Heraclitus

For other people named Heraclitus, see Heraclitus (disambiguation).

Heraclitus
Heraclitus, depicted in engraving from 1825
Born	c. 535 BC Ephesus, Ionia, Persian Empire (now Selçuk, İzmir, Turkey)
Died	c. 475 BC (age c. 60) Ephesus, Ionia, Delian League
Notable work	On Nature
Era	Pre-Socratic philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Ionian
Main interests	Metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, cosmology
Notable ideas	Logos, fire is the arche, unity of opposites, "everything flows", becoming
Influences Milesian school, Bias of Priene, Xenophanes
Influenced Parmenides, Empedocles, Cratylus, Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, Cynicism, Montaigne, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Popper, McTaggart, Whitehead, Jung, Pater, D. H. Lawrence

Heraclitus of Ephesus (/ˌhɛrəˈklaɪtəs/; Greek: Ἡράκλειτος Herakleitos, "Glory of Hera"; c. 535 – c. 475 BC, fl. 500 BC) was an Ancient Greek, pre-Socratic, Ionian philosopher and a native of the city of Ephesus, which was then part of the Persian Empire.

Heraclitus was of distinguished parentage, but he eschewed his privileged life for a lonely one as a philosopher. Little else is known about his early life and education; he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. He was considered a misanthrope who was subject to depression and became known as "the weeping philosopher" in contrast to the ancient philosopher Democritus, who was known as "the laughing philosopher".

His paradoxical philosophy and appreciation for wordplay and cryptic utterances has earned him the epithet "The Obscure" since antiquity. He wrote a single work, only fragments of which have survived, increasing the obscurity associated with him. Heraclitus has thus been the subject of numerous interpretations. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Heraclitus has been seen as a "material monist or a process philosopher; a scientific cosmologist, a metaphysician and a religious thinker; an empiricist, a rationalist, a mystic; a conventional thinker and a revolutionary; a developer of logic—one who denied the law of non-contradiction; the first genuine philosopher and an anti-intellectual obscurantist."

Heraclitus believed the world is in accordance with Logos (literally, "word", "reason", or "account") and is ultimately made of fire. He also believed in a unity of opposites and harmony in the world. He was most famous for his insistence on ever-present change—known in philosophy as "flux" or "becoming"—as the characteristic feature of the world; an idea expressed in the sayings, "No man ever steps in the same river twice", and panta rhei ("everything flows"). His use of fire may have been a metaphor for change. This changing aspect of his philosophy is contrasted with that of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, who believed in "being" and in the static nature of the universe. Both Heraclitus and Parmenides had an influence on Plato, who went on to influence all of Western philosophy.

Life

Bust of Pythagoras, Musei Capitolini, Rome.

The main source for the life of Heraclitus is the doxographer Diogenes Laërtius; the author Charles Kahn questioned the validity of Laërtius's account as "a tissue of Hellenistic anecdotes, most of them obviously fabricated on the basis of statements in the preserved fragments". The stories about Heraclitus could be invented to illustrate his character as inferred from his writings.

Historians are uncertain of the dates between which Heraclitus was active. Diogenes Laërtius stated Heraclitus flourished in the 69th Olympiad between 504 and 501 BC.

Birth

Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor, birthplace of Heraclitus

According to Laertius, Heraclitus was born to a Greek aristocratic family c. 535 BC in Ephesus(presently Efes, Turkey) in the Persian Achaemenid Empire. His dates of birth and death are based on a lifespan of 60 years, the age at which Diogenes Laërtius says he died, with his floruit in the middle. Heraclitus's father was named either Blosôn or Herakôn. Diogenes Laërtius says Heraclitus abdicated the kingship (basileia) in favor of his brother and Strabo confirms there was a ruling family in Ephesus that descended from the Ionian founder Androclus; according to Strabo, this family maintained its titles and could sit in the chief seat at the games, along with other privileges. The extent of the king's powers is unknown; Ephesus had been part of the Persian Empire since 547 BC and was ruled by a satrap (governor) who remained a distant figure: Cyrus the Great allowed the Ionians considerable autonomy.

Childhood

Diogenes Laërtius says Heraclitus used to play knucklebones with youths in the great temple of Artemis—the Artemisium, one of the largest temples of the 6th century BC and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. When asked to start making laws, he refused, saying the politeia (constitution) was ponêra, which can mean either it was fundamentally wrong or that he considered it toilsome. Two extant letters between Heraclitus and Darius I, which are quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, are later forgeries.

According to Laërtius, Sotion said Heraclitus was a "hearer" of Xenophanes, which according to Laërtius contradicts Heraclitus' statement he had taught himself by questioning himself. Burnet states; "Xenophanes left Ionia before Herakleitos was born". Laërtius says as a boy, Heraclitus had said he "knew nothing" but later claimed to "know everything".

Misanthropy

Heraclitus (with the face and in the style of Michelangelo) sits apart from the other philosophers in Raphael's School of Athens.

Diogenes Laërtius relates Heraclitus had a poor opinion of human affairs, and is generally considered an opponent of democracy,. Heraclitus also criticized Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus for lacking understanding despite their educated positions, and had the most scorn for Pythagoras. Among notable individuals he criticized are Homer and Archilochus, both of whom he thought deserved to be beaten. The only man of note he praises is Bias of Priene, one of the Seven Sages of Greece. John Tzetzes relates that Heraclitus hated the Athenians and his fellow Ephesians, wishing the latter wealth in punishment for their wicked ways.

Illness and death

Diogenes Laërtius lists several stories about Heraclitus' death; in two versions, he is cured of dropsy and dies of another disease; in another account, he "buried himself in a cowshed, expecting that the noxious damp humour would be drawn out of him by the warmth of the manure", while another says he treated himself with a liniment of cow manure and after a day prone in the sun, he died and was interred in the marketplace. or that he was devoured by dogs after smearing himself with dung.

According to Burnet:

Herakleitos said (fr. 68) that it was death to souls to become water; and we are told accordingly that he died of dropsy. He said (fr. 114) that the Ephesians should leave their city to their children, and (fr. 79) that Time was a child playing draughts. We are therefore told that he refused to take any part in public life, and went to play with the children in the temple of Artemis. He said (fr. 85) that corpses were more fit to be cast out than dung; and we are told that he covered himself with dung when attacked with dropsy. Lastly, he is said to have argued at great length with his doctors because of fr. 58. For these tales see Diog.ix. 3–5.

Writings

Heraclitus deposited his book in the Artemisium.

As with the other pre-Socratic philosophers, only fragments of Heraclitus' writings survive in quotations by other authors. In the case of Heraclitus, there are more than 100 of these catalogued using the Diels–Kranz numbering system.

Heraclitus is known to have produced a single work on papyrus.The work's opening lines are known, as Sextus Empiricus quotes the whole passage in Against the Mathematicians suggesting that the entire book was a continuous work. The title is unknown., but many later philosophers in this period refer to this work as On Nature. Charles Kahn states; "Down to the time of Plutarch and Clement, if not later, the little book of Heraclitus was available in its original form to any reader who chose to seek it out". Laërtius comments on the notability of the text, stating; "the book acquired such fame that it produced partisans of his philosophy who were called Heracliteans". Prominent philosophers identified today as Heracliteans include Cratylus and Antisthenes—not to be confused with the cynic.

According to Diogenes Laërtius, Heraclitus deposited the book in the Artemisium as a dedication. Laërtius also states Heraclitus' work was "a continuous treatise ... but was divided into three discourses, one on the universe, another on politics, and a third on theology". Laertius does not say whether Heraclitus or another person divided them this way. Burnet cautions against attributing this division to Heraclitus himself, stating that "all we can infer is that the work fell naturally into these three parts when the Stoic commentators took their editions of it in hand".

Heraclit by Luca Giordano

According to Diogenes Laërtius, Timon of Phlius called Heraclitus "the Riddler" (αἰνικτής; ainiktēs), saying Heraclitus wrote his book "rather unclearly" (asaphesteron); according to Timon, this was intended to allow only the "capable" to attempt it. By the time of Cicero, this epithet became "The Obscure" (ὁ Σκοτεινός; ho Skoteinós) as he had spoken nimis obscurē, "too obscurely", concerning nature and had done so deliberately in order to be misunderstood. Aristotle quotes part of the opening line in the Rhetoric to outline the difficulty in punctuating Heraclitus without ambiguity; he debated whether "forever" applied to "being" or to "prove". Theophrastus says (in Diogenes Laërtius) "some parts of his work [are] half-finished, while other parts [made] a strange medley".

Heraclitus

Philosophy

Diogenes Laërtius summarizes Heraclitus's philosophy, stating; "All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things (τὰ ὅλα ta hola ("the whole")) flows like a stream".

Logos

Main article: Logos

Greek spelling of logos.

The meaning of Logos (λόγος) is subject to interpretation; though Heraclitus used it in multiple senses there is no evidence he used it in a way that was significantly different from that in which it was used by contemporaneous speakers of Greek.

Eduard Zeller's opinion of Heraclitean logos stated:

λόγος  in my [Zeller's] opinion, refers indeed primarily to the discourse, but also to the contents of the discourse, the truth expressed in it; a confusion and identification of different ideas, united and apparently included in one word, which should least of all surprise us in Heraclitus. He [Heraclitus] says: "This discourse (the theory of the world laid down in his work) is not recognised by men, although it ever exists (i.e. that which always exists, contains the eternal order of things, the eternal truth), for although all happens according to it (and thus its truth is confirmed by all facts universally) men behave as if they had never had any experience of it, when words or things present themselves to them, as I here represent them" (when the views here brought forward are shown them by instruction or by their own perceptions)

Guthrie considers the Logos as a public fact like a proposition or formula, though he admits that Heraclitus would not have considered these facts as abstract objects or immaterial things.

Fire

Like the Milesians before him, Thales with water, Anaximander with apeiron, and Anaximenes with air, Heraclitus considered fire as the Arche, the fundamental element that gave rise to the other elements, perhaps because living people are warm. Other scholars see it as a metaphor for change. It is also speculated this shows the influence of Persian Zoroastrianism with its concept of Atar.

On Heraclitus using Fire as a new primary substance, Burnet writes:

All this made it necessary for him to seek out a new primary substance. He wanted not merely something from which opposites could be "separated out," but something which of its own nature would pass into everything else, while everything else would pass in turn into it. This he found in Fire, and it is easy to see why, if we consider the phenomenon of combustion. The quantity of fire in a flame burning steadily appears to remain the same, the flame seems to be what we call a "thing." And yet the substance of it is continually changing. It is always passing away in smoke, and its place is always being taken by fresh matter from the fuel that feeds it. This is just what we want. If we regard the world as an "ever-living fire" (fr. 20), we can understand how it is always becoming all things, while all things are always returning to it.

Unity of opposites

On the unity of opposites, Burnet says:

The "strife of opposites" is really an "attunement" (armonia). From this it follows that wisdom is not a knowledge of many things, but the perception of the underlying unity of the warring opposites. That this really was the fundamental thought of Herakleitos is stated by Philo. He says: "For that which is made up of both the opposites is one; and, when the one is divided, the opposites are disclosed. Is not this just what the Greeks say their great and much belauded Herakleitos put in the forefront of his philosophy as summing it all up, and boasted of as a new discovery?"

In this union of opposites, of both generation and destruction, Heraclitus called the oppositional processes ἔρις (eris), "strife", and hypothesizes the apparently stable state, δίκη (dikê), "justice", is a harmony of it, which Anaximander described as injustice. Aristotle said Heraclitus disliked Homer because Homer wished that strife would leave the world, which according to Heraclitus would destroy the world; "there would be no harmony without high and low notes, and no animals without male and female, which are opposites".

The One and the Many

Kitharode by the Berlin Painter.

The bow's name is life, though its work is death.

On Heraclitus' teachings of the one and many, Burnet writes; "The truth Herakleitos proclaimed was that the world is at once one and many, and that it is just the 'opposite tension' of the opposites that constitutes the unity of the One. It is the same conclusion as that of Pythagoras, though it is put in another way." Burnet also writes about Plato's understanding of Heraclitus:

According to Plato, then, Herakleitos taught that reality was at once many and one. This was not meant as a logical principle. The identity which Herakleitos explains as consisting in difference is just that of the primary substance in all its manifestations. This identity had been realised already by the Milesians, but they had found a difficulty in the difference. Anaximander had treated the strife of opposites as an "injustice," and what Herakleitos set himself to show was that, on the contrary, it was the highest justice (fr. 62).

Becoming

Heraclitus's philosophy's focus on change is commonly called "becoming", which has been contrasted with Parmenides' concept of "being". For this reason, Heraclitus and Parmenides are commonly considered to be two of the founders of ontology and the issue of the One and the Many, and thus pivotal in the history of Western philosophy and metaphysics.

Panta rhei ("everything flows")

On Heraclitus' teachings on flux, Burnet writes:

Fire burns continuously and without interruption. It is always consuming fuel and always liberating smoke. Everything is either mounting upwards to serve as fuel, or sinking downwards after having nourished the flame. It follows that the whole of reality is like an ever-flowing stream, and that nothing is ever at rest for a moment. The substance of the things we see is in constant change. Even as we look at them, some of the stuff of which they are composed has already passed into something else, while fresh stuff has come into them from another source. This is usually summed up, appropriately enough, in the phrase "All things are flowing" (panta rei), though this does not seem to be a quotation from Herakleitos. Plato, however, expresses the idea quite clearly. "Nothing ever is, everything is becoming"; "All things are in motion like streams"; "All things are passing, and nothing abides"; "Herakleitos says somewhere that all things pass and naught abides; and, comparing things to the current of a river, he says you cannot step twice into the same stream" (cf. fr. 41). these are the terms in which he describes the system.

The River

Heraclitus's philosophy of becoming has been illustrated using the image of a river: Simplicius references it thus: "the natural philosophers who follow Heraclitus, keeping in view the perpetual flux of generation and the fact that all corporeal things are coming to be and departing and never really are claim that all things are always in flux and that you could not step twice in the same river". The German classicist and philosopher Karl-Martin Dietz interprets the metaphor as illustrating what is stable, rather than the usual interpretation of illustrating change. "You will not find anything, in which the river remains constant ... Just the fact, that there is a particular river bed, that there is a source and an estuary etc. is something, that stays identical. And this is ... the concept of a river."

However, some classicists and professors of ancient philosophy have disputed which of these fragments can truly be attributed to Heraclitus. Professor of ancient philosophy M. M. McCabe has argued that the three statements on rivers should all be read as fragments from a discourse. McCabe suggests reading them as though they were arose in succession. McCabe writes that the three fragments, "could be retained, and arranged in an argumentative sequence". In McCabe's reading of the fragments, Heraclitus can be read as a philosopher capable of sustained argument, rather than just aphorism.

God and the soul

Heraclitus by Hendrick ter Brugghen

By "God", Heraclitus does not mean a single deity as primum movens ("prime mover") of all things or God as Creator, the universe being eternal; he meant the divine as opposed to human, the immortal as opposed to the mortal and the cyclical as opposed to the transient. To him, it is arguably more accurate to speak of "the Divine" and not of "God".

Heraclitus regarded the soul as a mixture of fire and water, and that fire is the noble part of the soul and water is the ignoble part, and he considered mastery of one's worldly desires to be a noble pursuit that purified the soul's fire. He also believed we breathe in the logos, as Anaximenes would say, of air and the soul.

The phrase Ethos anthropoi daimon ("man's character is [his] fate") attributed to Heraclitus has led to numerous interpretations, and might mean one's luck is related to one's character. The translation of daimon in this context to mean "fate" is disputed; according to Thomas Cooksey, it lends much sense to Heraclitus' observations and conclusions about human nature in general. While the translation as "fate" is generally accepted as in Charles Kahn's "a man's character is his divinity."

Influence

Ancient philosophy

Parmenides may have been responding to Heraclitus.

Parmenides's poem argues change is impossible; he may have been referring to Heraclitus with such passages as "Undiscerning crowds, who hold that it is and is not the same, and all things travel in opposite directions!". Most historians believe Heraclitus was older than Parmenides, whose views constitute a critical response to those of Heraclitus, though the reverse is also possible and it remains a subject of debate. Heraclitus refers to older figures such as Pythagoras and is silent on Parmenides, who possibly refers to Heraclitus.

The sophists such as Protagoras may also have been influenced by Heraclitus.

Antisthenes (Ancient Greek: Ἀντισθένης) was a writer from ancient Greece who was a disciple of Heraclitus, on whose work he wrote a commentary. This Antisthenes may be the same as the one who wrote a work on the succession of the Greek philosophers (αἱ τῶν φιλοσόφων διαδοχαί), which is often referenced by Diogenes Laërtius in his own work. This remains unclear, however, and Laërtius may have been referring to the historian Antisthenes of Rhodes instead, who may have also been the same Antisthenes mentioned by Phlegon of Tralles.

Plato is the most famous philosopher who tried to reconcile Heraclitus and Parmenides; through Plato, both of these figures influenced virtually all subsequent Western philosophy. According to Aristotle, Plato knew of the teachings of Heraclitus through his student Cratylus, who went a step beyond his master's doctrine and said one cannot step into the same river once. Plato presented Cratylus as a linguistic naturalist, one who believes names must apply naturally to their objects. According to Aristotle, Cratylus took the view nothing can be said about the ever-changing world and "ended by thinking that one need not say anything, and only moved his finger". Cratylus may have thought continuous change warrants skepticism because one cannot define a thing that does not have a permanent nature.

Coin from c. 230 AD depicting Heraclitus as a Cynic, with club and raised hand.

The Stoics believed major tenets of their philosophy derived from the thought of Heraclitus, which is most evident in the writings of Marcus Aurelius Explicit connections of the earliest Stoics to Heraclitus showing how they arrived at their interpretation are missing, but they can be inferred from the Stoic fragments, which Long concludes are "modifications of Heraclitus". Heraclitus states, "We should not act and speak like children of our parents", which Marcus Aurelius interpreted to mean one should not simply accept what others believe. Marcus Aurelius understood the Logos as "the account which governs everything", but Burnet cautions that these modifications of Heraclitus in the Stoic fragments make it harder to use the fragments to interpret Heraclitus himself, as the Stoics ascribed their own interpretations of terms like "logos" and "ekpyrosis" to Heraclitus. The Cynics were also influenced by Heraclitus, attributing several of the later Cynic epistles to his authorship.

Aenesidemus, one of the major ancient Pyrrhonist philosophers, claimed in a now-lost work that Pyrrhonism was a way to Heraclitean philosophy because Pyrrhonist practice helps one to see how opposites appear to be the case about the same thing. Once one sees this, it leads to understanding the Heraclitean view of opposites being the case about the same thing. A later Pyrrhonist philosopher, Sextus Empiricus, disagreed, arguing opposites' appearing to be the case about the same thing is not a dogma of the Pyrrhonists but a matter occurring to the Pyrrhonists, to the other philosophers, and to all of humanity.

Hippolytus of Rome, one of the early Church Fathers of the Christian Church identified Heraclitus along with the other Pre-Socratics and Academics as sources of heresy, and identified the logos as meaning the Christian "Word of God", such as in John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word (logos) and the Word was God". However, modern scholars such as John Burnet viewed the relationship between Heraclitean logos and Johannine logos as fallacious, saying; "the Johannine doctrine of the logos has nothing to do with Herakleitos or with anything at all in Greek philosophy, but comes from the Hebrew Wisdom literature".The works of dozens of writers in hundreds of pages have survived; all of them mentioned the Christian form of the Logos. German physicist and philosopher Max Bernard Weinstein classed Hippolytus's view as a predecessor of pandeism. The Christian apologist Justin Martyr took a more positive view of Heraclitus. In his First Apology, he said both Socrates and Heraclitus were Christians before Christ: "those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them".

Modern philosophy

Heraclitus from the Nuremberg Chronicle

Michel de Montaigne proposed two archetypical views of human affairs based on Heraclitus and Democritus, selecting Democritus's for himself.

G. W. F. Hegel gave Heraclitus high praise; according to him, "the origin of philosophy is to be dated from Heraclitus". He attributed dialectics to Heraclitus rather than, as Aristotle did, to Zeno of Elea, saying; "There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic".

Friedrich Nietzsche saw Heraclitus as a confident opposition to Anaximander's pessimism. and interpreted Heraclitus as finding frivolity of a child in both man and God; he summarized Heraclitus' thought as "And as the child and the artist plays, so too plays the ever living fire, it builds up and tears down, in innocence—such is the game eternity plays with itself".

Carl Jung wrote that Heraclitus had "discovered the most marvellous of all psychological laws: the regulative function of opposites ... by which he meant that sooner or later everything runs into its opposite". Jung adopted this law, called enantiodromia, into his analytical psychology. He related it with Chinese classics, stating; "If the Western world had followed his lead, we would all be Chinese in our viewpoint instead of Christian. We can think of Heraclitus as making the switch between the East and the West."

Bertrand Russell interpreted Heraclitus as a kind of proto-empiricist; this view is supported by some fragments W. K. C. Guthrie disputes this interpretation, citing "Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men who have barbarian souls".

Martin Heidegger was also influenced by Heraclitus, as seen in his Introduction to Metaphysics. According to Heidegger; "In Heraclitus, to whom is ascribed the doctrine of becoming as diametrically opposed to Parmenides' doctrine of being, says the same as Parmenides".

Crying Heraclitus and laughing Democritus by Donato Bramante

Democriet (laughing) & Herakliet (crying) by Cornelis van Haarlem

Democritus by Johannes Moreelse

Heraclitus by Johannes Moreelse

Depictions in art

Heraclitus has been portrayed several times in western art, especially as the "weeping philosopher" alongside Democritus, who is known as the "laughing philosopher" part of the weeping and laughing philosopher motif. This pairing, which may have originated with the Cynic philosopher Menippus, generally references their reaction to the folly of mankind.

The laughing philosopher and the weeping philosopher by Johann Christoph Ludwig Lücke

Heraclitus also appears in Raphael's School of Athens, which was painted in around 1510. Raphael depicted Michelangelo as Heraclitus; he and Diogenes of Sinope are the only men to sit alone in the painting. Heraclitus seems to write a poem, though he also looks away from his pen and paper. Salvator Rosa also painted Democritus and Heraclitus, as did Luca Giordano, together and separately in the 1650s. Giuseppe Torretti sculpted busts of the same duo in 1705. Giuseppe Antonio Petrini painted "Weeping Heraclitus" circa 1750.

Bibliography

Ancient Primary Sources

• Hippolytus (1886). "Refutation of All Heresies". In Alexander Roberts; James Donaldson (eds.). The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A. D. 325. Christian Literature Company. Retrieved 6 March 2022.
•  Laërtius, Diogenes (1925). "Others: Heraclitus" . Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Vol. 2:9. Translated by Hicks, Robert Drew (Two volume ed.). Loeb Classical Library.

Modern Philosophical Interpretations

• Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1909). "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks". In Mügge, Maximilian A.; Levy, Oscar; Haussmann, William A.; Kennedy, J. M. (John McFarland); Ludovici, Anthony Mario; Collins, Adrian; Zimmern, Helen (eds.). The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Vol. 2. [Edinburgh, London, T. N. Foulis.
• Heidegger, Martin; Fink, Eugen; Seibert, Charles H. (1993). Heraclitus Seminar. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-1067-0.. Transcript of seminar in which two German philosophers analyze and discuss Heraclitus' texts.

Translations with Commentary on the Fragments

• Kirk, G. S. (1954). Heraclitus, the Cosmic Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Davenport, Guy (1979). Herakleitos and Diogenes. Bolinas: Grey Fox Press. ISBN 978-0-912516-36-3.
• Heraclitus; Haxton (translator), Brooks; Hillman (Forward), James (2001). Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. New York: Viking (The Penguin Group, Penguin Putnam, Inc.). ISBN 978-0-670-89195-5. {{cite book}}: |last2= has generic name (help). Parallel Greek & English
• Patrick, G. T. W. (1889). Heraclitus of Ephesus: The Fragments. Baltimore, N. Murray.
• Wheelwright, Philip (1959). Heraclitus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Marcovich, Miroslav (2001). Heraclitus. Greek Text with a Short Commentary. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag. ISBN 978-3-89665-171-6. First edition: Heraclitus, editio maior. Mérida, Venezuela, 1967
• Kahn, Charles H. (1979). The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-21883-2.
• Sallis, John; Maly, Kenneth, eds. (1980). Heraclitean fragments. University: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 978-0-8173-0027-2.
• Robinson, T. M. (1987). Heraclitus: Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-6913-9.
• Dietz, Karl-Martin (2004): Metamorphosen des Geistes. Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart 2004, Band 1: Prometheus der Vordenker: Vom göttlichen zum menschlichen Wissen. Band 2: Platon und Aristoteles. Das Erwachen des europäischen Denkens. Band 3: Heraklit von Ephesus und die Entwicklung der Individualität. Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart, 2004, ISBN 3-7725-1300-X

General Works on Pre-Socratic Philosophy

• Barnes, Jonathan (1982). The Presocratic Philosophers [Revised Edition]. London & New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN 978-0-415-05079-1.
• Burnet, John (1892). "Heraclitus". Early Greek Philosophy. A. and C. Black. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
• Fairbanks, Arthur (1898). The First Philosophers of Greece. New York: Scribner.
• Guthrie, W. K. C. (1962). A History of Greek Philosophy: The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wright, M. R. (1985). The Presocratics: The main Fragments in Greek with Introduction, Commentary and Appendix Containing Text and Translation of Aristotle on the Presocratics. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. ISBN 978-0-86292-079-1.
• West, Martin L. (2002). Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient. Clarendon Press. Retrieved 6 March 2022. Chapters 4-6 deal with Heraclitus
• Graham, D. W. (2008). "Heraclitus: Flux, Order, and Knowledge". In Curd, P.; Graham, D. W. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 169–188. ISBN 978-0-19-514687-5.
• Graham, D. W. (2002). "Heraclitus and Parmenides". In Caston, V.; Graham, D. W. (eds.). Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Alexander Mourelatos. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp. 27–44. ISBN 978-0-7546-0502-7.
• Bollack, Jean; Wismann, Heinz (1972). Héraclite ou la séparation (in French). Paris: Minuit. ISBN 9782707303851.
• Dilcher, Roman (1995). Studies in Heraclitus. Hildesheim: Olms. ISBN 978-3-487-09986-6.
• Hussey, Edward (1972). The Presocratics. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0684131188.
• Kirk, G. S.; Raven, J. E. (1957). The Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Long, A. A. (2001). Stoic Studies. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-22974-7.
• McCabe, Mary Margaret (2015-05-01), Platonic Conversations, Oxford University Press, pp. 1–31, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732884.003.0001, ISBN 978-0-19-873288-4, retrieved 2021-07-12
• McKirahan, R. D. (2011). Philosophy before Socrates, An Introduction With Text and Commentary. Indianapolis: Hackett. ISBN 978-1-60384-183-2.
• Mourelatos, Alexander, ed. (1993). The Pre-Socratics : a collection of critical essays (Rev. ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02088-4.
• Naddaf, Gerard (2005). The Greek Concept of Nature. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0791463734.
• Schofield, Malcolm; Nussbaum, Martha Craven, eds. (1982). Language and logos : studies in ancient Greek philosophy presented to G. E. L. Owen. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. ISBN 978-0-521-23640-9.

External links

• Quotations related to Heraclitus at Wikiquote
• Works related to Fragments of Heraclitus at Wikisource
• Media related to Heraclitus at Wikimedia Commons
• Graham, Daniel W. (2019). "Heraclitus". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The editors. Retrieved 2013-08-25.
• Stamatellos, Giannis. "Heraclitus of Ephesus: Life and Work". Retrieved 2007-10-12.
• Trix. "Heraclitus' Epistemological Views". sym•pos•i•a: σuμποσια: the online philosophy journal. Archived from the original on 2007-09-29. Retrieved 2007-10-10.