CHAPTER ONE THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 1. The accessibility of the original reflections on language. Heraclitus The philosophy of language has ...

Two broad metaphysical perspectives deriving from Parmenides and Heraclitus have implications for our notion of sustainability. The Parmenidian defends a deepseated orderliness and permanence in things, while the Heraclitian finds only chance and change. Two further outlooks, the nomic (or the big-picture scientific) and the prudential, present differing accounts of our place in the world. While the nomic outlook accepts nothing privileged about the human perspective or even life itself, the prudential outlook is obviously welfare-centered. It is argued that nomic (...) views, whether Parmenidian or Heraclitian, fail to provide any rationale for sustainability measures or concerns. The only such rationale comes from Parmenidian prudentialism, which, I argue, can operate only if it disowns at its peril the nomic point of view and couches sustainability entirely under the rubric of maximizing certain preferred opportunities drawn from collective self-love. But doing so merely evades rather than answers the tension imposed by the nomic Heraclitian for whom nothing lasts and nothing human counts specially in the measure. The liabilities of Parmenidian prudentialism are examined and found to be too great for any consistent notion of sustainability to bear. (shrink)

This paper aims to reexamine Nietzsche’s early interpretation of Heraclitus in an attempt to resolve some longstanding scholarly misconceptions. Rather than articulate similarities or delineate the lines of influence, this study engages Nietzsche’s interpretation itself in its historical setting, for the first time acknowledging the contextual framework in which he was working. This framework necessarily combines Nietzsche’s reading in philology, post-Kantian scientific naturalism, and of the romantic worldviews of Schopenhauer and Wagner. What emerges is not the acceptance of the metaphysical-flux (...) doctrine so much as a natal form of his physiognomic theory ofperspectivism, a naturalistic and anti-teleological conception of flux, and a theory of justice as cosmodicy. (shrink)

The article sets out to reinterpret Heraclitus' views on religion and, by implication, his position in the context of the Presocratic philosophers' relationship to the Greek cultural tradition. It does so by examining the fragments in which Heraclitus' attitude to the popular religion of his time is reflected. The analysis of the fragments 69, 68, 15, 14, 5, 96, 93 and 92 DK reveals that the target of Heraclitus' criticism is not the religious practices themselves, but their popular interpretation. Heraclitus' (...) fragments are simultaneously shown to identify the underlying structure of the 'unity of opposites,' inherent in various religious practices. Heraclitus appears to reinterpret religious practices in terms of the conceptual structures of his own philosophy. On the other hand, religion provides him with the categories for the construction of his philosophical theology. Thus Heraclitus' treatment of religion is shown to be analogous to his treatment of ethics and politics, which he also tries to incorporate into his highly integrated vision of reality. In contrast to Xenophanes' radical critique of the traditional religion, Heraclitus emerges not as a reformer or an Aufklärer, but as an interpreter, who tries to discern the structures of meaning inherent in the existing practices, and to assume them into his own philosophical project. (shrink)

Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge stands at the threshold of his last major philosophical phase, the period from his retirement from the London School of Economics in 1969 until his death in 1994. The two great books that he wrote before he came to London, Logik der Forschung (1934) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), contain much more than the innovations in the theory of scientific method and the theory of democracy for which they are famous. Logik der Forschung, (...) translated into English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), is by no means just a tract, even a revolutionary one, on the methods of science, since about one third of the text is devoted to searchingly original treatments of the frequency theory of probability and of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, whilst the unpublished manuscript on which the book was based, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (1979), at whose content it often hints, presents a wealth of significant material on the psychology of human learning and its biological context. Popper had, after all, been a student of Karl B¨ uhler, and had absorbed the theories of problem solving developed within the W¨ urzburg School (Popper 1974a, § 15). The Open Society and Its Enemies, for its part, is not so much a book defending democratic liberalism as a defence of democratic liberalism nestling within a book that discusses every other topic under the sun. It offers profound and provocative studies of the thought of Plato and Marx (see Hacohen 2000, Chapter 9, for a critical appreciation), an abundance of scholarly, if often controversial, historical interpretations of the work of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Wittgenstein, Mannheim, and others, the elements of a new theory of rationality, and many elucidations of the workings of science that go beyond what is explicit in Logik der Forschung. One insight worth mentioning, since it is little known, is the clear recognition in section II of Chapter 11 that the progress of science is typically revolutionary, not cumulative; a commonplace today perhaps, but one.... (shrink)

In this first paper dealing with Heraclitus' doctrine as such (as opposed to the texts both of our sources on him and of the surviving fragments of his book), the author examines and discusses two recent controversial articles with the content of which he sympathizes - one by Gábor Betegh (2007) on the cosmological (physical) status of Heraclitus' psychê, and the other by Aryeh Finkelberg (1998) on Heraclitus' cosmogony and the reality of a Heraclitean world conflagration. This (...) examination is aimed, first, at fostering "marginal" opinions which the author believes to be fundamentally correct - and the rejection of which since times immemorial (by Schleiermacher and others) he considers to have greatly harmed and hampered our understanding of the Ephesian philosopher ; second, at introducing some personal corrections and additions to these opinions ; and third, at illustrating the advantages of a deliberately un prejudiced approach towards our sources, an approach based on the presumption of innocence, knowledgeability and intelligence for all our informers and on the rejection of any rejection [this is not a dittography!] of any source on ground of mere suspicion.Among the proposed novelties (or olden oblivitions) the following particularly deserve to be underscored: (1) the defense of the authenticity of "fr. B 76" DK qua three different fragments and (2) the reconstruction of Heraclitus' system of four physical exhalations - both of which are connected with the notion of a world soul; and (3) the interpretation of Plat. Soph. 242 C - 243 A [T 132] as confirming (and not as contradicting) Arist. De cael. 279b12 [T 170] and (4) the cosmogonical interpretation of F 31 - both of which presuppose the reality of a Heraclitean ecpyrosis.Yet, since the author's dogmatism does not extend beyond the requirement of having re course to (methodo)logically sound procedures, he is ready to give up any conclusion of which it can be proven that it is irreconcilably contradicted by a sounder one and supported by none. (shrink)

The Concept “hope,” (Greek), appears in two of Heraclitus’s fragments. This essay offers an attentive reading of these fragments and examines the role of hope in Heraclitus’s thinking. The essay is divided into two parts. The first part examines the meaning of the Greek notion for hope, (Greek), by looking into archaic and classical sources, particularly the myth about the origin of hope in Hesiod’s Works and Days. Based upon the renewed understanding of the concept, the second part of the (...) essay examines Heraclitus’s use of the concept of hope and demonstrates the central role of hope in Heraclitus’s thinking. (shrink)

This book addresses the question of how and why history begins with the work of Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War is distinctive in that it is a prose narrative, meant to be read rather than performed. It focuses on the unfolding of contemporary great power politics to the exclusion of almost all other elements of human life, including the divine. Western history has been largely an extension of Thucydides' narrative in that it repeats the unique methodological assumptions and (...) concerns that first appear in his text. The power of Thucydides' text has never been attributed either to the charm of its language or to the entertainment value of its narrative, or to some personal attribute of the author. In this study, Darien Shanske analyzes the difficult language and structure of Thucydides' History and argues that the text has drawn in so many readers into its distinctive world view precisely because of its kinship to the contemporary language and structure of Classical Tragedy. This kinship is not merely a maTter of shared vocabulary or even aesthetic sensibility. Rather, it is grounded in a shared philosophical position, in particular on the polemical metaphysics of Heraclitus. (shrink)

It will be shown in this article that an ontological approach for some problems related to the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics could emerge from a re-evaluation of the main paradox of early Greek thought: the paradox of Being and non-Being, and the solutions presented to it by Plato and Aristotle. More well known are the derivative paradoxes of Zeno: the paradox of motion and the paradox of the One and the Many. They stem from what was perceived by classical philosophy (...) to be the fundamental enigma for thinking about the world: the seemingly contradictory results that followed from the co-incidence of being and non-being in the world of change and motion as we experience it, and the experience of absolute existence here and now. The most clear expression of both stances can be found, again following classical thought, in the thinking of Heraclitus of Ephesus and Parmenides of Elea. The problem put forward by these paradoxes reduces for both Plato and Aristotle to the possibility of the existence of stable objects as a necessary condition for knowledge. Hence the primarily ontological nature of the solutions they proposed: Plato's Theory of Forms and Aristotle's metaphysics and logic. Plato's and Aristotle's systems are argued here to do on the ontological level essentially the same: to introduce stability in the world by introducing the notion of a separable, stable object, for which a principle of contradiction is valid: an object cannot be and not-be at the same place at the same time. So it becomes possible to forbid contradiction on an epistemological level, and thus to guarantee the certainty of knowledge that seemed to be threatened before. After leaving Aristotelian metaphysics, early modern science had to cope with these problems: it did so by introducing "space" as the seat of stability, and "time" as the theater of motion. But the ontological structure present in this solution remained the same. Therefore the fundamental notion `separable system', related to the notions observation and measurement, themselves related to the modern concepts of space and time, appears to be intrinsically problematic, because it is inextricably connected to classical logic on the ontological level. We see therefore the problems dealt with by quantum logic not as merely formal, and the problem of `non-locality' as related to it, indicating the need to re-think the notions `system', `entity', as well as the implications of the operation `measurement', which is seen here as an application of classical logic (including its ontological consequences) on the material world. (shrink)

Our world is a world of change. Children are born and grow into adults. Material possessions rust and decay with age and ultimately perish. Yet scepticism about change is as old as philosophy itself. Heraclitus, for example, argued that nothing could survive the replacement of parts, so that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Zeno argued that motion is paradoxical, so that nothing can alter its location. Parmenides and his followers went even further, arguing that the (...) very concept of qualitative change is inconsistent. Change in any respect is impossible, they argued, since change requires difference and nothing differs from itself.1 Few today would accept the Eleatic conclusion that change is impossible. But the topic of change continues to be a source of much debate, as it brings together various issues that are central to metaphysics, language and logic – including identity, persistence, time, tense, and temporal logic. As we consider various approaches to our topic, it will become clear that one’s perspective on change is often determined by one’s position in the broader philosophical landscape. (shrink)