Essay Database

Introduction 1. Fl. 500 B.C. in Ephesus, north of Miletus in Asia Minor. He was known in antiquity as "the obscure." And even today, it is very difficult to be certain what Heraclitus was talking about. As Barnes says (Presocratics, p. 57): "Heraclitus attracts exegetes as an empty jampot wasps; and each new wasp discerns traces of his own favourite flavour." The reason for this is Heraclitus's dark and aphoristic style. He loved to appear to contradict …

…ht that change and permanence could co-exist, that is, that an object could persist in spite of continually undergoing change in some respect or other. 2. If you step in the same river, you step in different waters: the river is still (numerically) the same river even though it has changed (compositionally), in that it (the same river) is now composed of different waters. 3. So it is unlikely that Heraclitus denied that there are persisting objects.