David Dale's Profile

air rather than
water.

Milesians bucked this trend by developing a suitably naturalistic view
of the world,

This kind of metaphysics is one of the things that
signals the beginning of philosophy, because it makes nature amenable to
investigation through scientific (or proto-scientific) methods. And it
is really in these methods that philosophy reveals itself.

It is this reliance upon reason and publicly available
evidence that defines philosophy, and it is thus the Milesian reliance
upon these methods that truly entitles them to be called the first
philosophers.