Heraclitus (redirected from Panta rhei)

Heraclitus (hĕrəklī`təs), c.535–c.475 B.C., Greek philosopher of Ephesus, of noble birth. According to Heraclitus, there was no permanent reality except the reality of change; permanence was an illusion of the senses. He taught that all things carried with them their opposites, that death was potential in life, that being and not-being were part of every whole—therefore, the only possible real state was the transitional one of becoming. He believed fire to be the underlying substance of the universe and all other elements transformations of it. He identified life and reason with fire and believed that no man had a soul of his own, that each shared in a universal soul-fire.

Bibliography

See his Cosmic Fragments, ed. by G. S. Kirk (1954, repr. 1962); study by G. O. Griffith (1977).

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Heracleitus

 or Heraclitus

(born c. 540, Ephesus, in Anatolia—died c. 480 BC) Greek philosopher. Little is known of his life; the one book he apparently wrote is lost, and his views survive only in short fragments attributed to him. In his cosmology, fire forms the basic material principle of an orderly universe: he called the world order an “ever-living fire kindling in measures and being extinguished in measures,” and he extended fire's manifestations to include the ether in the upper atmosphere. The persistence of unity despite change is illustrated by his famous analogy of the river: “Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and ever different waters flow down.” Plato later took Heracleitus to mean that all things are in constant flux, regardless of how they appear to the senses.

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Heraclitus

?535--?475 bc, Greek philosopher, who held that fire is the primordial substance of the universe and that all things are in perpetual flux

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Heraclitus

the weeping philosopher; melancholic personality. [Gk. Phil.: Hall, 98]

See : Crying

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Heraclitus

(535–475 B.C.) “Weeping Philosopher”; grieved over man’s folly. [Gk. Hist.: Brewer Dictionary, 1146]

See : Pessimism