Since i am currently presenting a seminar for two libraries, on this issue, i thought that i could make a thread here too, mostly so that i too might be helped if people note any mistake, or that they might have some interesting reading on this subject anyway 
The first 1-hour seminar will be about Miletos, in Karia, western Coastal Asia Minor, and Thales and his student Anaximandros, and to a degree the student of the latter, Anaximenes.
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Aristotle, writing three centuries later, names Thales of Miletos as the first philosopher. Thales lived in the 7th century and the start of the 6th century BC, in an era of rapid colonial expansion by Miletos (which was the main power in the black sea, founding Sinope, Abydos, Lampsakos, Sozopolis, Pontic Olbia and so on) but also political turmoil due to the aspirations of Lydia under its king Croesos.
Thales is also argued by Democritos (another notable philosopher, from Abdera in coastal Thrace) to have been the first scientist, mostly due to his mathematical work on the proof that if a triangle has two edges in points in the periphery of the circle, and its hypothenuse being the diameter of that circle, it follows that the angle above the hypothetuse is a right angle.
He is also credited by Herodotos as being the first person to calculate when a lunar eclipse would happen, as it did during a battle between Lydia and the Medes, leading to a truce (supposedly while Croesos already knew of the eclipse to take place, by Thales, who is also placed in that campaign). Thales, of course, was also one of the Seven Sages of Greece.
No works by Thales himself survive. Eukleid attributes the proof of his theorem to him, in his own foundational work on Geometry. His student, Anaximander, continued his work in the principle that the phenomena in the world are to be studied solely through logic and experiment (Thales is also credited as being the first to use experiment, and also to be the one who devised the canonic form of the 'gnomon', a ruler-like instrument which has a right angle and allows for easy drawing of right lines). According to Aristotle and later philosophers the two fundamental philosophical schools in the Greek world were the Ionian one (starting with Miletos and then including Ephesos, Klazomenae and other cities in Ionia) and the Italiotic one, centered in Elea and the Eleatic philosophers (Zeno being the most famous to modern audiences, but despite his origin in Samos Pythagoras is also counted in that school, due to other similarities and moreover his own travels to Greek cities in Italy).
The main differentiation between the Ionian and the Italiotic philosophic schools was that the first argued that the principles (archaes) of the cosmos could be studied in specific material or mental formations (eg water, logos, air, fire, indefinite, etc) while the Eleatic and related school argued that the principles are themselves inherently escaping set definition (an example would be the paradoxes of Zeno, where movement or other changes are argued to be cancelled if viewed from other points of view, while the phenomenon itself is the same in nature).
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So, the above is the overview of my first seminar (second in practice, but first in the main program anyway...) and i mean to focus on the three Milesian philosophers, with some juxtaposition to a few other names of the era and some later examiners of that era (Aristotle or Diogenes Laertios mostly)..
I think it will work ok
The first 1-hour seminar will be about Miletos, in Karia, western Coastal Asia Minor, and Thales and his student Anaximandros, and to a degree the student of the latter, Anaximenes.
*
Aristotle, writing three centuries later, names Thales of Miletos as the first philosopher. Thales lived in the 7th century and the start of the 6th century BC, in an era of rapid colonial expansion by Miletos (which was the main power in the black sea, founding Sinope, Abydos, Lampsakos, Sozopolis, Pontic Olbia and so on) but also political turmoil due to the aspirations of Lydia under its king Croesos.
Thales is also argued by Democritos (another notable philosopher, from Abdera in coastal Thrace) to have been the first scientist, mostly due to his mathematical work on the proof that if a triangle has two edges in points in the periphery of the circle, and its hypothenuse being the diameter of that circle, it follows that the angle above the hypothetuse is a right angle.
He is also credited by Herodotos as being the first person to calculate when a lunar eclipse would happen, as it did during a battle between Lydia and the Medes, leading to a truce (supposedly while Croesos already knew of the eclipse to take place, by Thales, who is also placed in that campaign). Thales, of course, was also one of the Seven Sages of Greece.
No works by Thales himself survive. Eukleid attributes the proof of his theorem to him, in his own foundational work on Geometry. His student, Anaximander, continued his work in the principle that the phenomena in the world are to be studied solely through logic and experiment (Thales is also credited as being the first to use experiment, and also to be the one who devised the canonic form of the 'gnomon', a ruler-like instrument which has a right angle and allows for easy drawing of right lines). According to Aristotle and later philosophers the two fundamental philosophical schools in the Greek world were the Ionian one (starting with Miletos and then including Ephesos, Klazomenae and other cities in Ionia) and the Italiotic one, centered in Elea and the Eleatic philosophers (Zeno being the most famous to modern audiences, but despite his origin in Samos Pythagoras is also counted in that school, due to other similarities and moreover his own travels to Greek cities in Italy).
The main differentiation between the Ionian and the Italiotic philosophic schools was that the first argued that the principles (archaes) of the cosmos could be studied in specific material or mental formations (eg water, logos, air, fire, indefinite, etc) while the Eleatic and related school argued that the principles are themselves inherently escaping set definition (an example would be the paradoxes of Zeno, where movement or other changes are argued to be cancelled if viewed from other points of view, while the phenomenon itself is the same in nature).
*
So, the above is the overview of my first seminar (second in practice, but first in the main program anyway...) and i mean to focus on the three Milesian philosophers, with some juxtaposition to a few other names of the era and some later examiners of that era (Aristotle or Diogenes Laertios mostly)..
I think it will work ok
