An amusing takedown (earlier); an excerpt:

It is said that the very first Western philosopher was Thales of Miletus, who lived from around 620 to 546 BCE. That is about 150 years before Socrates, and 200 years before Plato. His greatest claim to fame is his conjecture that “all is water,” which is important because it is our earliest record of someone asking about the fundamental constituent stuff of reality. But Thales second greatest claim to fame involves that time he fell in a well or a pit or whatever it was. Plato conveyed the story in the Theatetus dialogue…

[W]hat really matters is the point that Plato was trying to convey: People are always up in philosophers’ business, giving them shit for not doing practical things. Sometimes philosophers feel the sting of this criticism and take it to heart. According to Aristotle, Thales decided to show the world that he could do practical things if he wanted to, so one season when he predicted a large imminent olive harvest, he cornered the market on olive presses and price gouged the poor olive famers around Miletus. He thus became not only the father of western philosophy, of but risk arbitrage as well. A Milesian Gordon Gekko. Aristotle thought Thales thus proved that “it is easy for philosophers to be rich if they choose, but this is not what they care about.”