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Aristotle drew on a preceding Greek tradition of inquiry which he saw as dating back to Thales of Miletus (circa 620-546 BCE) more than 150 years previously. We know of this tradition from surviving fragments of text, and its mention by subsequent authors, including, particularly, Aristotle himself. Aristotle distinguished between a group of thinkers which he called 'inquirers into nature' or ''physiologoi'' as distinct from poetical 'myth-makers'. The latter, such as the Greek poet Hesiod (circa 750-650 BCE) explained the world primarily by positing divinities who behaved like super-powerful versions of human beings, with human-like genealogies and conflicts. These gods intervened in all aspects of the world, rendering it beyond mere human understanding. By contrast, ''physiologoi'' saw the world as an ordered natural arrangement, or '''Kosmos''' potentially comprehensible to the human mind. Plato and Aristotle used the term '''philosophy''' to refer to this latter line of inquiry. Beginning in the eighteenth century this group of thinkers, who were active before, or contemporaneously with Socrates came to be referred to as the '''pre-Socratics'''. [[CiteRef::Curd (2016)]]
The pre-Socratics developed a variety of ideas about the nature of reality and cosmology. The '''Pythagorean tradition''', founded in the sixth century BCE by Phythagoras of Samos, maintained that mathematical order and harmony is the reality that underlies nature. [[CiteRef::Curd (2016)]][[CiteRef::Losee (2001)|p. 14-19]] Leucippus (5th century BCE) and Democritus (460-370 BCE) were pre-Socratic '''atomists''' (although they were actually contemporaneous with Socrates). They maintained that all things are composed of assemblages of invisibly small, solid, indivisible particles called atoms. These atoms exist within a void space and interact mechanically by contact. All things and processes in the world, they supposed, could be explained in terms of the arrangements, movements, and mechanical interactions of atoms. Although it may seem that there are colours, tastes, and smells, in reality, they supposed there are only atoms and void. They denied that any teleology exists at this fundamental level. Democritus distinguished two kinds of knowledge, that obtained from the senses, and that garnered through the understanding. Reason, applied to sensory experience in the proper way, yielded atomistic understanding. [[CiteRef::Curd (2016)]][[CiteRef::Editors of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018a)]][[CiteRef::Editors of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018b)]][[CiteRef::Losee (2001)|p. 24-25]][[CiteRef::Berryman (2016)]]
The ideas about knowledge which most directly set the context for Aristotle's work were those of his teacher Plato.
