Pherecydes of Syros c. 580–520 BCEIn the early sixth century BCE, on the rocky island of Syros in the Cyclades, far from the philosophical ferment of Ionia and even further from the great Greek cities of Italy and Sicily, there lived a strange, quiet, solitary thinker whose influence would ripple outward in ways neither he nor his contemporaries could have fully imagined. Pherecydes—sometimes written Pherekydes—occupies an unusual position in the history of philosophy. He stands between myth and reason, between poetic cosmogony and speculative argument, between epic storytelling and metaphysical system-building. He predates Pythagoras, overlaps with Thales and Anaximander, and is sometimes named as the teacher of Pythagoras himself. But his thought is neither purely mythic like Hesiod nor purely naturalistic like the Milesians. Instead, Pherecydes creates something in between: the first Greek prose cosmology, a bold attempt to tell the story of the universe with gods who are not quite humanized and yet not quite abstract principles either. His work is fragmentary, enigmatic, and difficult to classify, but it represents a moment when Greek thinking was learning to transform myth into metaphysics.Selenius Media

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