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Heraclitus: World
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Heraclitus is the philosopher of the eternal change. His well known statement is that ‘everything flows’. He expresses this notion of eternal change and mobility in terms of the continuous flow of the river which always renews itself. Heraclitus’ view of cosmos is that of continuous conflict between species. He converts this world into various shapes as a harmony of the opposites. The composition of opposites sustains everything in nature.
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Heraclitus had a very strong influence on Plato. Plato interpreted Heraclitus to have believed that the material world undergoes constant change. He ... thought Heraclitus was approximately correct in so describing the material world. Plato believed that such a world would be unknowable, and was thus driven to the conclusion that the material world was, in some sense, unreal, and that the real, knowable, world was immaterial.
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Heraclitus requires his audience to try to think away their purely personal concerns and view the world from this more detached perspective. By the use of telling examples he highlights the relativity of value judgments. The implication is that unless people reflect on their experience and examine themselves, they are condemned to live a dream-like existence and to remain out of touch with the formula that governs and explains the nature of things. This formula is connected (symbolically and literally) with 'ever-living fire', whose incessant 'transformations' are not only the basic operation of the universe but ... essential to the cycle of life and death. Fire constitutes and symbolizes both the processes of nature in general and also the light of intelligence. As the source of life and thought, a 'fiery' soul equips people to look into themselves, to discover the formula of nature and to live accordingly.
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An extension of Heraclitus' belief in the stability underlying change was his theory of Logos,. According to Heraclitus, logos connected all things in nature and ... served as a unifying formula. Man himself was an inexorable part of logos. This belief in the unifying formula of logos was apparent in Heraclitus' cosmology(18). The primary element of Heraclitus' world was fire; in his view of the world some of the fire was extinguished, forming both land and sea, and some remained burning as the stars in the heavens. Man fit into this scheme of the cosmos because his soul came from the same heavenly fire.
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Although his words are meant to provide concrete vicarious encounters with the world, Heraclitus adheres to some abstract principles which govern the world. Already in antiquity he was famous for advocating the coincidence of opposites, the flux doctrine, and his view that fire is the source and nature of all things. In commenting on Heraclitus, Plato provided an early reading, followed tentatively by Aristotle, and popular down to the present (sharpened and forcefully advocated by Barnes 1982, ch. 4). According to Barnes’ version, Heraclitus is a material monist who believes that all things are modifications of fire. Everything is in flux (in the sense that “everything is always flowing in some respects,” 69), which entails the coincidence of opposites (interpreted as the view that “every pair of contraries is somewhere coinstantiated; and every object coinstantiates at least one pair of contraries,” 70). The coincidence of opposites... interpreted, entails contradictions, which Heraclitus cannot avoid.
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Although Heraclitus presents himself as uniquely enlightened, he was clearly familiar with the leading thinkers of his time. He draws attention to the relativity of judgments and the difference between humans and animals in ways that recall Xenophanes' critique of religious beliefs. He almost certainly knew and rejected Pythagoras' doctrine of the transmigration of souls (see Pythagoras). His cosmology is both indebted to and a criticism of Milesian science: the criticism appears particularly in his denial of the world's beginning, but his focus on the law-like processes of nature has clear affinities with Anaximander's celebrated doctrine of cosmic justice.
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