In this chapter we shall ask how and why Thales’s intellectual descendants in Ionia, Italy, and then Athens harnessed his spirit of nonreligious inquiry to the investigation of the unseen structures and causes of change not only in land, sea, and sky but also in human experience and human activities. They asked about the invisible inner workings of our bodies; they probed the relationship between the worlds we see in our mind’s eye and those our senses tell us are physically there, how we make decisions about right and wrong, how we collect information, why different peoples speak different
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