Thalès

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani mainly discusses Thales in connection with the birth of theoretical mathematics, which he launches together with Pythagoras and where he opens the ground before Euclid1. He often returns to the measurement of the great pyramid by its shadow, using similar triangles: he sees in it a "knowing before going to look", a determination in advance that stands against empiricism23. He also links this to the prediction of eclipses, which he presents as the first triumph of prediction4. He also cites Kant's remark that the first person to demonstrate the isosceles triangle understood that he had to construct the figure from the concept, a priori5. He places Thales among the pre-Socratics called "physicists", for whom water is the principle from which everything is deduced. Yet he wonders whether this principle belongs to the material order or to the symbolic order6. Finally, he repeatedly takes up the legend of Thales falling into a well while looking at the stars, an image that opinion likes to give of the intellectual caught out7.

1. 1De Platon à la révolution mondiale par Dominique Pagani14 Jul 2022 · 25:54
2. 2Hegel Plage 2/51 Feb 2016 · 20:19
3. 3#2.7 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?1 Aug 2017 · 1:29:13
4. 4#4.5 Angélique (de Nerval)12 Feb 2018 · 1:16:32
5. 5De Copernic à Lénine: Révolution !28 Aug 2026 · 50:00
6. 6#4.9 Angélique (de Nerval)14 Jun 2018 · 22:15
7. 7La mondanité chez Clouscard - Le choc des mondes ?9 Jul 2023 · 17:06

Summary produced automatically from 24 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.