An Answer to the First Prompt

Here is an example of a passing answer to the first prompt.

This answer is passing because it answers all parts of the prompt and is understandable to someone who does not already understand the philosophical and historical issues in the prompt.

If you think that your answer might not be understandable in this way, go into more detail. The answer I provide below is an example of the minimum required for a pass.

Describe the new kind of understanding the Milesian inquirers tried to provide. In your answer, explain the circumstances that led to a desire for this new kind of understanding.

Explain the circumstances that led to a desire for this kind of understanding.

Trade had been making it increasingly clear that there were various ways of life and beliefs about the world. ⊕ "The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and dark-skinned and the Thracians that they have blue eyes and red hair. But if oxen, horses or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and create works like men, then horses would draw the shapes of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen" (Xenophanes, DK 21 B 16, 15; D 13, 14).

Xenophanes is from Colophon, a city in Ionia about fifty miles north of Miletus. He was born in about 570 BCE. In the light of this information, it no longer seemed right to trust the traditional stories about the gods as explanations for why things happen in the world as they do. This crisis of confidence resulted in a desire for a kind of explanation and understanding of the world that for its authority did not depend on the weight of tradition.

Describe the kind of understanding the Milesian inquirers tried to provide.

Thales and his fellow Milesian inquirers into nature took a first step in the effort to discover this kind of understanding. Instead of appealing to the traditional stories about the gods, they tried to give more objective explanations for why things happen in the way they do.

Anaxamenes, for example, in his explanations, does not mention the gods. Instead, he takes air to be the nature of reality and explains the rains in terms of changes in this nature. Drops of water form in the sky when portions of the air condenses, that these drops fall to the ground as rain, and that these drops disappear as the air the constitutes them becomes less condense.

To find this explanation plausible, it is not necessary for us to have heard stories when we were children about how Zeus makes the rains. Whether this is enough to free the explanation from the weight of tradition for its authority is something Parmenides would question. We can see, though, that this is what the Milesian inquirers into nature were trying to do.