Ionian school (philosophy)

The Ionian school of pre-Socratic philosophy refers to Ancient Greek philosophers, or a school of thought, in Ionia in the 6th century B.C, the first in the Western tradition.

This article is about the ancient Greek school of thought. For other uses, see Ionian school (disambiguation).

The Ionian school included such thinkers as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and Archelaus.^[1] This classification can be traced to the doxographer Sotion. The doxographer Diogenes Laërtius divides pre-Socratic philosophy into the Ionian and Italian school.^[2] The collective affinity of the Ionians was first acknowledged by Aristotle who called them physiologoi (φυσιολόγοι),^[3] or natural philosophers. They are sometimes referred to as cosmologists, since they studied stars and maths, gave cosmogonies and were largely physicalists who tried to explain the nature of matter.

The first three philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) were all centred in the mercantile city^[4] of Miletus on the Maeander River and are collectively referred to as the Milesian school.^[5]^[6] They sought to explain nature by finding its fundamental element called the arche. They seemed to think although matter could change from one form to another, all matter had something in common which did not change. They were thus characterized by Aristotle as material monists. They also believed all was alive, or were hylozoists.^[7] The Milesians did not agree on what all things had in common, and did not seem to experiment to find out, but used abstract reasoning rather than religion or mythology to explain themselves, and are thus credited as the first philosophers.

History of metaphysical naturalism

Mechanism (philosophy)

Algra, Keimpe (1999). . In Long, A. A. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. pp. 250–270. ISBN 978-0-521-44667-9.

"The beginnings of cosmology"

Barnes, Jonathan (2002). . Early Greek Philosophy. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-044815-3.

"Diogenes of Apollonia"

Graham, Daniel W. (6 August 2006). . Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-12540-4.

Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy

White, Stephen A. (2008). . In Curd, Patricia; Graham, Daniel W. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 353–363. ISBN 978-0-19-514687-5.