Is The Enlightenment Over?

Abstract

This year, as I assume you know, is philosophy’s 2,578th anniversary, a good time to remember Thales who flourished, by predicting an eclipse, approximately that many years ago. Thales is often called ‘the father of philosophy’ or ‘the father of Western philosophy’ - though some feel ‘Western philosophy’ pleonastic, ‘philosophy’ being a Greek word, the proper name of what people who trace themselves back to Thales and the other Presocratics are up to and not the name of any other things, better or worse, family-resemblant or not, that other people are up to. It is, of course, worth nothing that philosophy has, in a kind of genderbent immaculate conception, no trace of a mother. For all we really know about the much mythologized and transfigured Thales, he might have been a woman, though tradition as well as doxography count against this.