The origins both of modern science and modern philosophy lie in Greek civilization of the 5th and 6th centuries B.C. It was then that a series of thinkers, usually known as the Presocratic philosophers, created ways of looking at the world that were fundamentally new. In the middle of social and political changes, and exposed to intellectual influences from the Near East as well as to traditional Greek ideas, the first Presocratics, Thales and Anaximander of Miletus, had a vision of a universe governed by absolute and impartial law. In terms of this idea they and their successors tried to account for the observed structure of the physical world.