Heraclitus

Explores how the fragments of Heraclitus might yield an implicit understanding of the human body in distinction to the soul. In the history of scholarship on Heraclitus, soul is a much better understood concept, whereas it is normally assumed that Heraclitus, along with other figures of early Greek thought, shows only the most limited comprehension of the human being in terms of bodily form or substance. In this work I sketch some different ways in which Heraclitus’ accounts of nature and (...) human life can be said to exhibit a rudimentary picture of body. I suggest that Heraclitus depicts the human body as a special form of soul’s self-differentiation and logos. I attempt to consider how Heraclitus may represent an historical moment in understanding the human in terms of its physical makeup. (shrink)

This article considers an interpretative model for the study of Heraclitus, which was first put forward by Alexander Mourelatos in 1973, and draws upon a related model put forward by Julius Moravcsik beginning in 1983. I further develop this combined model and provide a motivation for an interpretation of Heraclitus. This is also of interest for modern metaphysics due to the recurrence of structurally similar problems, including the ‘colour exclusion’ problem that was faced by Wittgenstein. Further, I employ the model (...) to shed new light on Heraclitus’ image of the river, while relating potential readings to various contemporary metaphysical views. (shrink)

In his adventurous monograph in comparative philosophy, The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India, Richard Seaford offers to explain why philosophy, which on his account originated in the sixth century BCE separately in both Greece and India, took such a similar form in both cultures.

This chapter aims to illuminate ways in which hope was significant in the philosophy of classical Greece. Although ancient Greek philosophies contain few dedicated and systematic expositions on the nature of hope, they nevertheless include important remarks relating hope to the good life, to reason and deliberation, and to psychological phenomena such as memory, imagination, fear, motivation, and pleasure. After an introductory discussion of Hesiod and Heraclitus, the chapter focuses on Plato and Aristotle. Consideration is given both to Plato’s direct (...) comments on hope and to the narrative contexts of his dialogues, with analysis of Plato’s positive and negative representations of hope, hope’s relationship to reason, and Plato’s more psychological approach in the Philebus, where hope finds a place among memory, recollection, pleasure, and pain. The chapter then reviews Aristotle’s discussions of confidence, hope, and courage, observing that although Aristotle does not mention hope as a virtue, he does note its importance to human agency and deliberation and as a foundation for the further development of virtue. The chapter concludes that discussions surrounding hope in ancient Greek philosophy are rich and challenging and can serve as a lively stimulus to further exploration of the concept of hope. (shrink)

This paper argues that Heraclitus was deeply and centrally interested in ethical questions, understood broadly as questions about how human beings should live. In particular, I argue, Heraclitus held that wisdom is essential for living well, and that most people lack the kind of fundamental insight into the nature of reality in which wisdom consists. Topics covered include Heraclitus’ views on: the good and bad condition of the soul, the nature and sources of wisdom, the reasons why most people remain (...) oblivious to the world in which they live, and the connections between acquiring genuine insight into reality and becoming like god. (shrink)

RESUMO A partir do exame da tradição heraclitiana e platônica sobre a transitoriedade e a imortalidade - conceitos compreendidos como universais - este artigo defende a seguinte antinomia como tese: para haver temporalidade é preciso haver eternidade. Essa tese é demonstrada por meio do estudo e atualização das noções de alma, espírito, ideia e memória, as quais estão conectadas invariavelmente ao tempo passado como princípio ontológico do fenômeno histórico. Para além do ponto de vista filosófico, portanto, da perspectiva específica do (...) conhecimento histórico, este estudo expõe algumas implicações teóricas acerca das condições de possibilidade da história, que são discutidas, finalmente, em diálogo com Friedrich Nietzsche e Jacob Burckhardt. ABSTRACT From the analysis of the Heraclitian and Platonic tradition on transience and immortality - understood as universal concepts - this essay defends the following antinomy as its thesis: if there is temporality there must be eternity. This thesis is demonstrated through the study and updating of the notions of soul, spirit, idea and memory, which are invariably connected to the past as the ontological principle of the historical phenomenon. Beyond the philosophical point of view, therefore, from the specific perspective of historical knowledge, this study exposes some theoretical implications about the conditions of possibility of history, which are finally discussed in dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt. (shrink)

Freud tracked the psyche along the paths of sleep, following the “royal road” of dreams. For the ancient Greeks, too, the psyche was revealed in sleep, not through the semiotics of dreams but through the peculiar state of being we occupy while asleep. As a “borderland between living and not living”, sleep offered unique access to the psukhē, that element within the self unassimilable to waking consciousness. This paper examines how Greek philosophers theorized the sleep state and the somnolent psukhē, (...) focusing on Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Each of the three attempts to reclaim sleep for waking life and to join the sleeping soul to the philosophical self. But that attempt never fully succeeds. Instead sleep consistently emerges as a philosophical blindspot, a state that—unlike dreams—cannot be spoken by philosophy's logos nor fully illuminated by philosophical analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a prominent question of Hericlitean scholarship: how is change possible? Karl Popper and G. S. Kirk tackle this same question. Kirk asserts that Heraclitus believed that change is present on a macrocosmic level and that all change is regulated by the cosmic principle logos. Popper, on the other hand, claims Heraclitus believed that change is microcosmic and rejected that all change is regulated by logos. I argue for a combination of aspects from each of their (...) claims and conclude that change is present both microcosmically and macrocosmically and that all change is governed by logos . (shrink)

This research is about altruism. In our first chapter, our quest to find whether we are essentially altruistic starts with questioning particular ways of inquiry and proposes a philosophy of unbracketing. In our second chapter, we realise that our proposal starts with an imperative – a prescription. We begin by meditating on the phenomenon of prescription which seems to precede all ways of inquiry. Our analysis of prescription reveals that altruism is to prescribe oneself towards an Other. This type of (...) prescription is to promise a future for an Other. To promise is to give one’s word and to undertake to realising it. In our third chapter, we explore the act of “giving one’s word.” To give one’s word is beyond a speech act. In fact, it is to give one’s logos. An altruistic attempt is carried out in this chapter to liberate ‘logos’ from particular conceptions and allow for its universal meaning to emerge. Logos is traced back to its inceptual conception as existence or will to power – a will to future. This philosophical excavation leads us to our fourth chapter where we re-encounter our original paradox. That is, while human reality starts with a promise of helping someone to make sense – to understand – we have been trying to understand understanding, or how we make sense, by removing the Other and by focusing only on subjective conditions. In this chapter, we reveal how to understand an Other is an altruistic act. In our final chapter, we carefully observe that human existence is a gift from the Other. We describe this gift as a metaphysical passage from being to existence – an altruistic act. A passage which is created by an Other who promises to give us the means to be able to create meaning, that is to say, to exist. (shrink)

The earliest recorded philosophical use of the term "phusis" occurs in the fragments of Heraclitus (most notably at B1 and B123). Phusis, in the non-philosophical writings relevant to Heraclitus’s time (e.g. from Homer to Aeschylus and Pindar), was generally used to characterize the external physical appearance of something. Heraclitus, on the other hand, seems to have used the term in the completely opposite manner: an object’s phusis is hidden (kruptesthai) and greater (kreissōn) than the external appearance (B123 and B54). Despite (...) this difference, Heraclitus’s use has an affinity with the common use in his time: phusis is used to characterize things. In B1, for example, Heraclitus makes it clear that he is interested in explaining the nature of each thing as opposed to some cosmic principle of Nature. By examining various fragments, I make the case that the phusis of a thing, for Heraclitus, can be defined as the set of opposites necessarily inherent in an object upon which all objects of that kind depend for their existence. The interesting result is that Heraclitus’s novel use of phusis happens to be the foundation for one of the ways in which opposites form a unity. This particular thesis states that there are essential properties inherent in objects which are pairs of opposites sufficient to determine the unity of the object in question. If this is right, then we can read some fragments which contain descriptions of worldly objects (e.g. bows, lyres, rivers, barley drinks etc.) in a new light. These descriptions of worldly objects might not be meant to stand as metaphoric symbols for cosmic principles, as is often thought; rather, they can be read as instances of Heraclitus attempting to do a metaphysics of objects. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

Paradoxical Utterances. An Approximation about Nishida’s Use of Heraclitus’ Fragments in An Inquiry into the Good (1911) -/- The paper discusses the use of Heraclitus’ ideas in Nishida Kitarõ early work, An inquiry into the Good (1911), in order to show how both thinkers, distant in time and philosophical tradition, coincide in present the formative process of reality, defending a common principle that impulses the process (named logos and “pure experience”). It also discusses how these principles can be feasible strategies (...) to escape from a substance-based ontology, but resulting in linguistic paradoxical assertions, able to show the possibility for an identity of opposites. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

Heraclitus is the first philosopher, and one of the few ones, who is aware of original contradiction. His thought still presents some ambiguities mostly due to the still intuitive discovery of the relation between language, contradiction and logos. Heraclitus saw the contradiction. He does not care about how the fact of communication is possible, as it indeed is, but rather he endeavours to put into question its problematic essence. -/- .

This essay draws on texts previously untranslated into English, and in particular Heidegger’s brilliant 1943 lecture course on Heraclitus, to show how Heidegger understood kosmos as an early Greek name for Being itself. The contemporary scholarship has altogether missed the significant role that this Greek Ur-word plays in his later thinking. The “gleaming,” “adorning” kosmos—which the later Heidegger understood to be “world” in the fullest and richest sense—is not in the first place any kind of transcendental-phenomenological “projection” of the human (...) being; rather, it is the resplendence of the “ever-living” Being-unfolding-way itself from out of which both the gods and human beings come to pass and pass away. The independence of kosmos/Being itself in relation to the human being is highlighted. An Ode by Pindar and a painting by Andrew Wyeth are also considered. (shrink)

Kant makes a much-unexpected confession in a much-unexpected place. In the Criticism of the third paralogism of transcendental psychology of the first Critique Kant accepts the irrefutability of the Heraclitean notion of universal becoming or the transitory nature of all things, admitting the impossibility of positing a totally persistent and self-conscious subject. The major Heraclitean doctrine of panta rhei makes it impossible to conduct philosophical inquiry by assuming a self-conscious subject or “I,” which would potentially be in constant motion like (...) other thoughts. For it rules out the possibility of completely detached reasoning which necessitates an unchanging state of mind. In this paper, Kaplama uses panta rhei to critically examine the philosophical shortcomings and contradictions of Kantian and Enlightenment ethics. In his examination, he specifically focuses on the teleological nature of Kant’s principle of freedom and ideal of moral autonomy which have dominated the Enlightenment thought. By doing so, he argues that it is essentially inaccurate to posit Überlegenheit (the state of being superior to nature) as the foundation of philosophical inquiry mainly because this would contradict the Enlightenment’s claim to constitute a rupture from classic and medieval metaphysics and would render Enlightenment a mere extension of Christian metaphysics. As in Christianity, Überlegenheit presupposes two separate realms, the actual (contingent) and ideal (pure) realms of thought and assumes that the transcendence commences from the level of the late metaphysical/teleological construction of the ‘subject’ who is completely persistent, self-conscious and immune to change. He then substantiates these points with reference to the philosophical roots of ethnic prejudice displayed by the post-Enlightenment colonialists and the missionaries in Fiji and the Pacific. This brief critical examination of the post-Enlightenment ethnocentrism will be conducted under the following three points: a) On the Enlightenment’s teleological and universalistic understanding of humanity and the concept of progress versus the Fijian concepts of the continuity of life, regeneration, and reproduction b) On the Enlightenment’s ideal of the free-willing and independent individual subject versus the Fijian ideas of 'the cord', reciprocity, and vanua, and c) On the Enlightenment’s (and Christianity’s) strict dualism between physics and metaphysics, nature and human mind, body and soul versus the Fijian bio-centrism, the sanctity of vanua and the cosmological concept of mana. (shrink)

The paper outlines a tentative genealogy of the Platonic metaphysics of sight by thematizing pre-Platonic thought, particularly Heraclitus and Parmenides. By “metaphysics of sight” it understands the features of Platonic-Aristotelian metaphysics expressed with the help of visual metaphors. It is argued that the Platonic metaphysics of sight can be regarded as the result of a synthesis of the Heraclitean and Parmenidean approaches. In pre-Platonic thought, the visual paradigm is still marginal. For Heraclitus, the basic structure of being is its discursive (...) articulation (logos) into conceptual pairs of binary opposites, an articulation that at the same time binds differences together into a tensional unity. The fundamental grasping of this ultimate unity-in-difference is conceived primarily through acoustic terms as a non-sensory “hearing.” For Parmenides, the ultimate unity of contraries is based on the capacity of thinking (noos) to intend anything as present; in fragment B 4, the exclusive relationship of thinking to intelligible presence is finally visualized in terms of a seeing or looking (leusso). (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine heraclitean fragments evoking the metaphor of rivers and waters flowing, usually associated by tradition to the image of reality in becoming and the conception of nature as a more or less disordered streaming. These fragments are certainly among the most celebrated and lucky fragments of the philosopher of Ephesus, which can be explained by the fact that they have been used since Plato and Aristotle, to represent in an exemplary way the philosophical (...) perspective of Heraclitus. These are the three fragments which appear in the collection of Diels and Kranz under the numbers 12, 49a and 91, and correspond, in the edition of Marcovich to the numbers 40, 40c2 and 40c3. This mere indication brings out the problem that should be given priority review with regard to the three mentioned fragments, this is the one of their authenticity. Admitted by Diels and Kranz and by a certain number of scholars, among which stands out Mouraviev, it is rejected, with respect fragments 49a and 91 DK [40c2 and 40c3 Marcovich] by other commentators, and primarily by Marcovich for whom, as suggested by the numbering that adopted itself, should be considered as mere reminiscences of the fragments 12 DK [40 Marcovich], the only authentic. (shrink)

Der Kurzbeitrag behandelt das Problem des quellen- und zukunftsorientierten Fragens im Zusammenhang der heutigen ökonomischen Professionalisierung. Dabei untersucht er im Ausgang vom Begriff der Geltung den einheitlichen, ontologischen Grundzug heutiger ökonomischer Verfahrensweisen. Es wird deutlich, dass dem gegenwärtigen gültigen Ökonomisieren die Leugnung der Faktizität von Sein und Zeit zugrundeliegt, womit eine Seins- und Zukunftslosigkeit einhergeht, in der sich jede zukunftsoffene Fragebahn wiederfindet.

An analysis of the poem of Parmenides from a natural science perspective shows that it is based on Heraclitus' book. Imagery, philosophy, and even words were borrowed from Heraclitus. The new picture that emerges warrants the conclusion that Parmenides paraphrased Heraclitus in verse.

The paper focuses on a neglected instance of the Platonic reception of Heraclitus in the Republic, trying to show that it’s likely that Plato’s passage makes an allusion to Heraclitus’ B97 and B85. The main claim is that Plato’s use of the image of dogs looks back to Heraclitus, which invites an exploration of the possibility that at least some elements of Plato’s kallipolis might derive from Heraclitus – particularly from some ethical and political fragments. A brief survey of these (...) suggests a deep philosophical affinity among the two authors in several important areas, and questions the commonplace traditional interpretation of Heraclitus as a defender of aristocratic morality. (shrink)

This essay provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of a cluster of Heraclitus’ fragments that revolve around an image of ‘musical’ harmony (B 8, 10, and 51 Diels-Kranz). The aim is to demonstrate that more numerous as well as more specific references to contemporary musical practice can be found in these fragments than is usually thought. In particular, it is argued that in his talk of cosmic harmonia Heraclitus might well know and exploit a musical sense of this word, namely, (...) that of ‘attunement’, which was already developing at his time from the primary meaning of ‘connection’ and ‘agreement’. Furthermore, it is shown that the investigation of musical patterns with which Heraclitus was clearly acquainted offered him a significant analogical ground for his reflection on the order and rationality of kosmos. He was not apparently interested in the numerical definition of musical patterns, and thus there is no need to assume any influence of earlier Pythagorean research on his theory of cosmic harmony: the other way round, this theory was likely food for thought for Philolaus. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new solution to the old problem of how best to understand the meaning of the word ‘logos’ in the extant writings of Heraclitus, especially in fragments DK B1, B2 and B50. On the view I defend, Heraclitus was neither using the word in a perfectly ordinary way in these fragments, as some have maintained, nor denoting by it some kind of general principle or law governing change in the cosmos, as many have claimed. Rather, (...) I argue, Heraclitus deliberately traded on the ordinary use of the word in his time (to refer to a written or spoken presentation of things as ‘thus and so’) to denote the world’s constant presentation of itself as ‘thus and so’ to all of us in our experience – a kind of cosmic self-revelation. I show how this captures the sense in which ‘the logos’ is said to be ‘common’ (xunos) and to be the kind of thing most people fail to comprehend even before hearing Heraclitus’ own account, all without detaching Heraclitus’ use of the word from its ordinary contemporary meaning. This interpretation suggests Heraclitus was a thinker more centrally concerned with human (mis)understanding than with speculative cosmology. (shrink)

The essay follows the fil rouge of ancient Greek thinking in the work of Gregory Bateson, an unusually multi-faceted and energetically nomadic intellect in the landscape of twentieth-century hyper-specialized disciplines, whose eclectic research focused on the question of life and of human participation in a living world. Through the reverberation of Neoplatonic motifs and echoing pre-Socratic intuitions, Bateson reflects on the “pattern which connects”—the λόγος that says one and all things, and the interpenetration of one and all things, thus operating (...) as the connective tissue of all that is, the communicational web of contacts, exchanges, and transmissions, perhaps the nervous system of life. (shrink)

This book is founded on a close reading of Kant’s Opus Postumum in order both to explore the essential motivation that drove Kant to write a last comprehensive magnum opus and, by doing so, to show the essential link between his aesthetics and the idea of Übergang, the title of this last work. For this work contains not only his dynamical theory of matter defining motion as preliminary to the notions of space and time, and the advanced version of his (...) philosophy of natural science, but also his arguments for the phenomenal validity of the metaphysical foundations, his teachings on the aesthetic human faculties of judgment and Anschauung, and the discernment of the transcendental philosophy from Platonic idealism carrying it to a cosmological level, i.e. Kant’s insertion of the concept of cosmotheoros. Since the process of transition is an aesthetic process based on human senses, intuitions and judgments, the argument will follow that in order to explicate Übergang, we need to reconcile cosmology, as the oldest branch of philosophy dealing with the interactions between the cosmic forces and the ways they affect human life, with aesthetics, as the youngest branch of philosophy dealing with how we sense, intuit and judge the form and motion of matter. Therefore, in the last analysis, Übergang becomes rather a cosmologic-aesthetic principle similar to the Heraclitean logos. Another building block of the book is the fruitful comparison between the Kantian sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian, which are going to be construed as the aesthetic theories on human understanding representing the transition from nature to art. For they are not only conceptual – aesthetic but also dynamic – cosmological theories due to their reference both to nature and to human nature. Finally, Cosmological Aesthetics employs the principles of transition and motion to analyze Van Gogh’s Starry Night in an excursus. (shrink)

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge fromthe timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as thepotential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation?This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints becauseit has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print,the apparatus (...) of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating movement ortimeas it occurs in human-centered experience. Following the work of Gilles Deleuze on cinema,this article argues that the outside of a human sense of time is an untapped source of invention,already present yet dormant within kairos. (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)

I shall tell you the story, propose an overview, and show the structure, goal, and peculiarities of this monstrous edition that I undertook forty-four years ago: the Heraclitea, of which ten volumes have appeared since 1999. One volume was published in November 2011 and a few others are still in preparation. While telling you this story, I shall strive to show the radical differences between my approaches and the standard ones taught worldwide in the departments of classics and ancient philosophy (...) in universities. (shrink)

Presocratic philosophy as a historical category was defined by Aristotle as physics, or physical philosophy, because φύσις was its object of study, its practitioners being since tagged accordingly as φυσικοί or φυσιόλογοι. The central part of the paper deals briefly with the four pioneering Heraclitean uses of the word φύσις, in which the sense of the only Homeric use of the term seems to be deepened and continued. Φύσις in Heraclitus has an ontological sense, and appears always in epistemic contexts, (...) as the object of search, criterion of knowledge, basis for action and language, susceptible of show­ing and concealing. Contrasting with Aristotle’s outlook, Plato’s Phaedo 95e ff. sheds a different light on φύσις, suggesting Plato’s acknowledgement of a wider metaphysical reach of Presocratic thought, and stressing historical continuity of the philosophical project as such. In particular, the meaning of the word φύσις in Plato and Heraclitus isn’t natural or physical reality, but reality tout court, or the nature of things. (shrink)

In her 1996 and 2006 essays “Being and Becoming: Rhetorical Ontology in Early Greek Thought” and “The Task of the Bow: Heraclitus’ Rhetorical Critique of Epic Language,” Carol Poster was the first to argue for the historical and theoretical relevance of Heraclitus in the discipline of rhetoric. Despite the admonitions of Edward Schiappa (1999) and Thomas Cole (1991) against applying rhetorical theories that only emerged after the fourth century BCE to pre- or proto-rhetorical texts, Poster argues that Heraclitus merits the (...) attention of rhetorical as well as philosophical scholarship not only because Heraclitus had such a profound influence on the thought and work of thinkers who would later become the ancient .. (shrink)

This article aims to throw light on a recurrent structural feature of Heraclitus' style that, it will be argued, serves as a tool to enrich interpretation of his fragments. Named after the bow image used by the philosopher in B51, the ‘bow composition’ will be presented as a narrative technique developed by Heraclitus to reveal his conception of the world. In B51 we read: οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαϕερόμενον ἑωυτῶι ὁμολογέει· παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης . Following an assumption that (...) will be defended later, I argue that Heraclitus attempts through his text to demonstrate how ‘what is in variance agrees with itself’. One of his strategies to this end would be the bow composition, a way to structure his statements in which its first and last terms share the same root but have subtle suffix or prefix differences in order to depict that while being related they still maintain some difference . By means of employing such structure to describe reality Heraclitus would imitate the world order in his word order by providing his audience with an analogy that once perceived in the text would teach them how to correctly interpret nature itself. (shrink)

Develops Heidegger’s understanding of the Greek gods in the summer 1943 lecture course on Heraclitus. Of particular note is Heidegger’s assertion at the beginning of the lecture course that “there is no Greek religion,” though Heraclitus is said to “have” gods. Heidegger holds that the essential activity of gods consists in "giving signs." An explanation of the connection between gods and their signs gains clarification by a study of how Heidegger understands the Greek concepts of theoi and daimones in the (...) earlier but related Parmenides course of winter 1942-43. (shrink)

This book collects texts from three specialists in ancient philosophy which deal with the question of perceptive and intellective knowledge in antiquity. They try to present, in their different analyzes, the complex interrelationship among perception and thought in ancient authors, like Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus, Plato and Aristotle. The purpose of the texts is to expose the visible field - the perceptual knowledge domain - interacts with the invisible - the domain of reason and thought. In other words, that among them (...) there is no a radical separation of these two areas, although they are clearly distinct. (shrink)

Eva Brann delves into Heraclitus's famously cryptic saying, "all things come to be in accordance with this Logos.".

Machine generated contents note: Notes on contributors; Introduction; Acknowledgements; Method of citation and bibliography of Heidegger's works; Part I. Interpreting Heidegger's Philosophy: 1. Heidegger's hermeneutics: towards a new practice of understanding Holger Zaborowski; 2. Facticity and Ereignis Thomas Sheehan; 3. The null basis-being of a nullity, or between two nothings - Heidegger's uncanniness Simon Critchley; 4. Freedom Charles Guignon; 5. Ontotheology Iain Thomson; Part II. Interpreting Heidegger's Interpretation: 6. Being at the beginning: Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus Daniel O. Dahlstrom; 7. (...) Being-affected: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the pathology of truth Josh Hayes; 8. Heidegger's interpretation of Kant Stephan Ka;ufer; 9. The death of God and the life of being: Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche Tracy Colony; 10. Heidegger's poetics of relationality Andrew Mitchell; Part III. Interpreting Heidegger's Critics: 11. Analyzing Heidegger: a history of analytic reactions to Heidegger Lee Braver; 12. Le;vinas and Heidegger: a strange conversation Wayne Froman; 13. Derrida's reading of Heidegger Françoise Dastur. (shrink)

Advocates an existential, phenomenological reading of Heraclitus suggested by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer observes that within the Heraclitean fragments lay a subliminal wonder at the contradiction and groundlessness of the human experience, particularly the unmediated experience of thinking. I take Gadamer to suggest in part that Heraclitus writes the fragments motivated by a sort of phenomenological disclosure, not necessarily of Being (pace Heidegger), but of the human experience as one of contradictory transitions and unrestricted movements between poles of opposition.