Heraclitus (ca. 500 BCE)

Heraclitus was a Presocratic philosopher in Ephesus, a Greek city in Ionia, ruled at the time by Persia. Little is known about his life. He reputedly wrote a treatise entitled “On Nature” and deposited it in the temple of Artemis, but no part of that text has survived. All we have are “fragments,” quotations from Heraclitus found in other ancient texts. It is difficult, therefore, to determine exactly what he thought. Like modern natural scientists Heraclitus appears to have thought that everything is constantly in motion, but that there is an underlying intelligible order. Like modern social scientists Heraclitus also raised questions about the grounds and validity of human judgments of right and wrong: “To God, all things are beautiful, good and just; but men have assumed some things to be unjust, others just.” Keywords: flux and opposition; knowledge; philosophy