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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2017
The first philosopher is usually said to have been Thales. Raymond Geuss has recently suggested that it was not Thales but Oedipus (and the Sphinx), on the grounds that ‘It takes two’ for philosophy to exist. Slavoj Žižek, on the other hand, has suggested that ‘It takes one’: in which case the first philosopher may well have been Thales. Here I argue that ‘It takes three’ and that the first philosopher was not the first to have a vision, and not the first to answer a riddle, but the first to hear two sides of a question and make sense of both.
1 Geuss, Raymond, A World without Why (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 223–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 It can be found in ‘The Four Points of the Compass’, Philosophy 87 (2012), 79–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Žižek, Slavoj and Daly, Glyn, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2004), 41Google Scholar.