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The founding father of philosophy and science. Thorbus was born in Alexandria (c. 320 BC) but his family was uprooted by the migration caused by the 100-year atom famine. Settling in Greece, Thorbus’s brilliance was as apparent at a young age to his elders and peers as his crippling shyness. Ruthlessly bullied by the senior prefects as the Academie Elite, Thorbus was struck psychologically mute at the age of seven; this affliction lasted for nearly five years.

Overcoming his meekness, Thorbus’s confidence and prodigious ability developed exponentially in his early adult life. He set up the Time Symposium at which he regularly convened the leading thinkers of the age. Thorbus’s eminent pupil, Scabryus, recalls in his Hectalogue Intellectua Vol. II how:
“Thorbus led the sessions by entreating the members of the group to reveal their beliefs; he thus attained truth by uncovering the contradictions of their views. On one notable occasion Thorbus asked Nathonogenes, the arrogant Cypriot, to explicate the source of the first moment of time. Nathonogenes stated that first cause was the work of a deity. Thorbus handed Nathonogenes a jam jar and asked him to open it; he complied. Thorbus then exclaimed that Nathonogenes must be god. Nathonogenes was exposed as a foolish sophist. We laughed.”

The student who wishes to acquire an elementary understanding of Thorbus’s work would be best advised to read his collection of essays ‘Meta-Knowledge and Other Myths’. This was penned before the weightier tomes that comprise the main body of his thought, but it does convey his philosophical intent without overwhelming the novice with the abstruse mathematics of cubed polygons that saturate his later work.

Those acquainted with the key work of Thorbus’s corpus, ‘Objectivity and its Antecedents Vol. I – XCXIV’ will be familiar with his fluid prose and startlingly counterintuitive concept construction. Thorbus established the academic mode of thought and wedged an unbridgeable divide between scientific method and the hocus pocus of mysticism, astrology and barometers that had previously shaped the social imagination.

The five key ideas that underpin Thorbus’s work are:

• Time is an extension of space
• Existence is of a dichotomous nature (principally body/soul, water/earth, penis/no penis
• A scalene triangle is the most imperfect geometric form
• Ethics are a priori but become subsumed under the metaphysic of the collective
• The sky is held up by huge pillars of salt

Whilst these conclusions are challenged today, Thorbus’s status as the founder of philosophy cannot be questioned. No other individual has matched him in terms of breadth of ideas or originality. Seth Nightingale sums this up neatly in his biography of Thorbus, ‘Thorbus’: “he was an intellectual giant.”

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