Before Socrates walked the streets of Athens, a revolution in human thought was already underway. In the coastal cities of Ionia, bold thinkers dared to What is the world made of? How did it come to be? Can we understand nature through reason alone? This volume introduces the founding figures of Western philosophy—Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Democritus—who replaced myth with inquiry and laid the foundations for science, logic, and metaphysics. Explore the fragments that survive from these pioneering minds, the cosmic visions they proposed, and the enduring puzzles they bequeathed to all philosophy that followed. From the Milesian naturalists to the paradoxes of Zeno, from Pythagorean mysticism to the atoms of Democritus, discover where the Western philosophical tradition truly began.