Heraclitus of Ephesus (Ancient Greek: — , English Heraclitus the Ephesian) (ca. 535–475 BC) was a pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher, a native of Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor.

Heraclitus is known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and that the Logos is both the source and fundamental order of all.

At some time in antiquity other than his own (at least as far as the evidence indicates) he acquired an epithet denoting that his major sayings were difficult to understand. Timon of Phlius calls him "the riddler" (ainiktēs) according to Diogenes Laertius, who had just explained that Heraclitus wrote his book "rather unclearly" (asaphesteron) so that only the "capable" should attempt it. By the time of Cicero he had become "the dark" (Ancient Greek — ) because he had spoken nimis obscurē, "too obscurely", concerning nature and had done so deliberately in order to be misunderstood. The customary English translation of follows the Latin, "the obscure."

Diogenes Laertius ascribes to Theophrastus the theory that Heraclitus did not complete some of his works because of melancholia. No additional detail is given, but the word melancholy comes from the Theory of the Four Humors attributed to Hippocrates. Theophrastus probably did not mean that Heraclitus was inflicted with dyscrasia ("bad mixture"), a hypothetical pathogenic condition caused by the excess of one of the humors, in this case black bile (melaina cholē), as he is not portrayed as insane or as having one of the diseases associated with that condition. Theophrastus probably simply meant that Heraclitus had a melancholy disposition, which is not clear in either English or ancient Greek. Not finishing the work might be a symptom of mild clinical depression; on the other hand, Heraclitus was also "the obscure."

Later he was referred to as the "weeping philosopher", as opposed to Democritus, who is known as the "laughing philosopher". calls the laughing of Democritus "late" and ascribes it to feasting. For a scholarly presentation the reader is referred to The brief presentation above is based on quotes of ancient authors given there.</bgref> If Stobaeus, a writer of the late empire, writes correctly, Sotion, mentor of Seneca in the early 1st century AD, was already using the duo as a teaching device: "Among the wise, instead of anger, Heraclitus was overtaken by tears, Democritus by laughter." The laughing Democritus appears alone briefly a few decades earlier in Cicero.

The Pseudepigrapha of the Hippocratic corpus</bgref> relate the story of a visit to Democritus by Hippocrates to investigate a report by the citizens of Abdera that Democritus had gone insane and was laughing at everything obsessively, including weddings and funerals. Hippocrates found him surrounded by books and the bodies of animals which he had dissected to examine their bile. He said he was investigating the causes of insanity. On being questioned as to why he found the matters at which he laughed comical, he replied with the vanity argument, that all is "folly and baseness" and a waste of time, which is essentially what Heraclitus had said. Hippocrates gave him a "passing" on mental health and went away.

Putting these traditions together the ancient professors of philosophy came up with the imaginative duo of weeping and laughing philosophers. The view is expressed in more or less complete form by the satirist Juvenal:</bgref>

Subsequently the duo were considered an indispensable feature of philosophic landscapes. Montaigne proposed two archetypical views of human affairs based on them, selecting Democritus' for himself. The weeping philosopher makes an appearance in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Act I Scene II Line 43. Donato Bramante painted a fresco, "Democritus and Heraclitus", in Casa Panigarola in Milan. And so on.

Throughout the middle ages and into the 19th century Heraclitus was portrayed as a "naturalist" with varying interpretations of that word. Diogenes says that the book attributed to him was On Nature (peri phuseōs) where the operant word is phusis, "nature." In the next statement Diogenes explains that by this he means "on the universe" (peri tou pantos, literally "about the everything"). In Fragment DK B123 Heraclitus explains that nature likes to hide. This statement places him among those seeking the hidden nature of things, akin to those who were seeking an explanation in substance.

Heraclitus had a rather different idea of the hidden nature than substance, but perhaps his ideas were too obscure for the ancient students of philosophy. He was being called physicus at least as early as Cicero: ... nemo physicus obscurus? ... valde Heraclitus obscurus .... "no physicus was obscure? ... Heraclitus the obscure certainly was." In Cicero and elsewhere he is lumped in that category with Democritus; perhaps the myth of the laughing and weeping duo also was having its effect.

The long-standing translation of physicus into English is "naturalist." If phusis is nature, then a phusicus must be a naturalist. For example, Serbati uses naturalist in translating a notable passage from Macrobius, which attributes to Heraclitus the view that the soul is a fragment of starfire. The Macrobian passage is The term naturalist in native English can have a great many meanings, most of which are responsible for myths about the gist of Heraclitus' thought.

The main source for the life of Heraclitus, as is true of many other philosophers, is Diogenes Laertius. Some have questioned the validity of the anecdotes based on political or social conjecture; however, there is no solid scholarship conclusively refuting the anecdotes.

Diogenes said that Heraclitus flourished in the 69th Olympiad, which would be 504-501 BC. All the rest of the evidence - whom Heraclitus is said to have known or who implies that he was familiar with Heraclitus' work - confirms the floruit but does nothing to establish the start and end dates. Those vary by several years in different authors but all are based on an estimated life span of 60 years, round numbers, with the floruit in the middle.

Heraclitus was born to an aristocratic family in Ephesus, present-day Efes, Turkey. His father was named Bloson.

There are several legendary stories about Heraclitus, especially concerning his eventual death from illness, including his supposed attempt to stave off death using dung and ignoring doctors. These mostly stem from mis-interpretations of the metaphors in his fragments and an attempt to construct a narrative based on these fragments.

Heraclitus disagreed with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras about the nature of the ultimate substance, and instead claimed that the nature of everything is change itself, and originates from the Logos. This led to the belief that change is real, and stability illusory. For Heraclitus everything is "in flux", as stated in his famous aphorism "Panta Rhei" ("Panta Rei"):

(Plato, Cratylus 402a)
Everything flows and nothing is left (unchanged), or
Everything flows and nothing stands still, or
All things are in motion and nothing remains still.

Heraclitus is recognized as one of the earliest dialectical philosophers with his acknowledgment of the universality of change and development through internal contradictions, as in his statements:

"By cosmic rule, as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace, plenty famine. All things change. Air penetrates the lump of myrrh, until the joining bodies die and rise again in smoke called incense."

"Men do not know how that which is drawn in different directions harmonises with itself. The harmonious structure of the world depends upon opposite tension like that of the bow and the lyre."

"This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures"

He is famous for (allegedly) expressing the notion that no man can enter the same river twice:

"We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not."

A modern translation of this quote may better illustrate how Aristotle's later position on the illogic of contradiction was not a direct refutation of Heraclitus:
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man."</blockquote>

The idea of the logos is also credited to him, as he proclaims that everything originates out of the logos. Further, Heraclitus said "I am as I am not", and "He who hears not me but the logos will say: All is one." Heraclitus held that an explanation of change was foundational to any theory of nature. This view was strongly opposed by Parmenides, who said that reality was permanent and unchanging. According to Lavine, Parmenides asked, "How can a thing change into something else? How can it be and not be?" According to Parmenides, change is merely an illusion.

His promotion of change also led Heraclitus to believe that conflict (e.g., agon in Greek) is necessary for change to occur and to argue against Homer: "War is the father of all and the king of all" and "Every animal is driven to pasture with a blow."

His view on the random chance inherent in the universe. is famously the direct opposite of Einstein's (in which he stated "God does not play dice with the universe"): "Time is a child moving counters in a game; the kingly power is a child's."

The Heraclitean emphasis on the nature of things and existence as one of constant change, expressed with language of polarity, is particularly reminiscent of another ancient philosophical tradition, that of Taoism: the Tao (or "the Way") often refers to a space-time sequence, and is similarly expressed with seemingly-contradictory language (e.g., "The Way is like an empty vessel / that may still be drawn from / without ever needing to be filled"). Indeed, parallels have been drawn between the fundamental concepts of the logos (as it was understood during Heraclitus's time) and the Tao.

We know from Diogenes Laertius's Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers that Heraclitus wrote a book. Diogenes also tells us that he deposited his book as a dedication in the great temple of Artemis, the Artemesium, one of the largest temples of the 6th century BCE (and one of the "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World"). Diogenes' report here is likely to be true; ancient temples were regularly used for storing treasures, and were open to private individuals under exceptional circumstances. Furthermore, many subsequent philosophers in this period refer to the work. "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." Furthermore, Heraclitus also became immensely popular in the period following his writing. Within a generation or two "the book acquired such fame that it produced partisans of his philosophy who were called Heracliteans." Unfortunately, as with other pre-Socratics, his writings only survive in fragments quoted by other authors.

According to some interpretations he uses fire — with its connotations of both Promethean/human "fire", and the cosmic fire outlined by contemporaneous pre-Socratics — as a metaphor rather than his solution to material monism, however the nature of the evidence is so sparse that it is difficult to substantiate this claim..

The interpretation of Heraclitus' work is diverse, partly due to the fragmentary nature of his statements, and partly due to the perspectives of his interpreters. Although many philosophers have acknowledged his influence, including Plato and Aristotle, his concept of Becoming, in which ontological opposites are seen as fundamentally interrelated, is central to his philosophy. More particularly, he wrote: "Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony" (frag. 98; trans William Harris). Both Plato and Aristotle would have disagreed. Plato believed that each thing has one unchanging essence. Aristotle was the first philosopher to formally state the law of non-contradiction as "one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time." Therefore Aristotelian logic is in direct opposition to logos, because statements like "I am as I am not" clearly violate the law of non-contradiction.

*Plato understood Heraclitus as the theorist of "panta rhei" (universal flux), as contrasted with Parmenides' conception of a fixed and stable reality. As a point of clarification, Heraclitus does not appear to have proposed that reality as a whole is unstable, but since Heraclitus recognized nothing but existence itself as stable (existence being one), his philosophy came into conflict with Plato's inclination toward multiple universal absolutes. Plato's theory of forms has been seen as a response to Heraclitus.

*Aristotle saw Heraclitus as "a material monist who derived the entire physical world from fire as its underlying element," and also as a kind of dialectical philosopher of harmonic opposition. Origen and Hippolytus of Rome also appear to have adopted the "dialectical" interpretation.

*The Stoics based their cosmology on Aristotle's materialistic interpretation of Heraclitus, and interpreted the Logos as transcendent Reason, immanent in the world. Kahn sees the Stoics as "the true Heracliteans of antiquity."

*Heraclitus' idea of the Logos was very influential on Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria, who connected it to Jewish notions of "Wisdom personified" as God's creative principle. Philo uses the term Logos throughout his treatises on Hebrew Scripture in a manner clearly influenced by Heraclitus' work.

*The author of the fourth Gospel, the Gospel of St. John (traditionally ascribed to John the Apostle) uses the term Logos throughout the first chapter of his book to describe the pre-human existence of Jesus as the Word (Logos) of God: "In the beginning was the Logos (Word), and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made....And the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." (John 1:1, 3, 14)

*Friedrich Nietzsche saw Heraclitus from a process perspective: "Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie." Heraclitus is commonly recognized as the first advocate of process philosophy the West, and a direct precursor to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

*Alfred North Whitehead, known for having seen all of Western philosophy as the legacy of Plato, saw Heraclitus as Plato did, yet referred to both the forms of Plato and the flux model of Heraclitus in developing his own thoughts on process philosophy.

*Oswald Spengler wrote his doctoral thesis on Heraclitushttp://www.johnreilly.info/sf2.htm, and his notion of eternal war was very strongly influenced by Heraclitus, who saw conflict as "the father of all things."http://www.axess.se/english/2007/01/theme_nordin.php

*Martin Heidegger in his 1943/44 lectures expansively discusses Heraclitus in the context of "the origin of occidental thought" and "logic - Heraclitus' teaching of logos", and credits the very coining of the term "philosophy" to Heraclitus, evidently because of Heraclitus' high regard for "sophon" (wisdom; what is wise).

*Karl Popper accused Heraclitus as having played a part in laying the foundations for a closed society. In particular, Popper concludes that Heraclitus relativises moral values, quoting Heraclitus: "The good and the bad are identical", relating to Heraclitus's theory of the unity of opposites. Popper also alleges Heraclitus of having formulated a historicist doctrine based on the "justice of war and the verdict of history a tribalist and romantic ethic of Fame, Fate, and the superiority of the Great Man".

*Carl Jung developed the psychological concept of enantiodromia (in a manner similar to Heraclitus' usage) to illustrate his notion that whenever an individual forms an asymmetrical, conscious ideation as fundamentally predominant, for example, "masculine" values and suppositions of a father archetypalfigure, there will necessarily be opposing forces, and that they will make themselves apparent within the unconscious in various ways as a means to maintain an individual's psychic balance.

* * * First published in 1892 this book has had dozens of editions and has been used as a textbook for decades. The first edition is downloadable from Google Books for free at http://books.google.com/books?id=LQYrAAAAMAAJ&dq=Early+Greek+philosophy&as_brr=3 and the text is also available on the Internet (follow the Wikipedia author link). * Complete fragments of Heraclitus in English. * . Transcript of seminar in which two German philosophers analyze and discuss Heraclitus' texts. * . Parallel Greek & English. * Book IX, Chapter 1, Heraclitus. * * *

* Dialectical monism * Pantheism * Panentheism * Process philosophy * Ontology * Taoism

* . A modern physicist looks at the problem of change as expressed by the law of identity of Aristotle and the flux of Heraclitus and formulates a relativistic solution. A basic knowledge of Symbolic logic and the concept of spacetime is required but advanced mathematics is not necessary. * Heraclitus bilingual anthology from DK in Greek and English, side by side, the translations being provided by the organization, Elpenor. * * Greek and English with DK numbers and commentary. * Text and selected aphorisms in Greek, English, Italian and French. * Selected fragments translated by Hooker. * The fragments also cited in DK in Greek (Unicode) with the English translations of John Burnet (see Biliography). * Essay on the flux and fire philosophy of Heraclitus. * Site with links to pdf's containing the fragments of DK in Greek (Unicode) with the English translations of John Burnet (see Biliography) and translations into French, either in parallel columns or interlinear, with links on the lexical items to Perseus dictionaries. Includes also Heraclitus article from Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. * *