ABSTRACT
Heraclitus (c.500 BC) was a loner among the earliest Greek philosophers. He came from Ephesus which, like Miletus, was a prosperous Ionian commercial city on the west coast of Asia Minor. Hence he belongs geographically and culturally to a milieu corresponding with that of the three Milesians. But in chronological terms he comes after both Pythagoras and Xenophanes whom he mentions. That he is dealt with here before those is because his philosophy can best be considered in relation to that of the old natural philosophers, even though he was in no way their pupil. He reinterpreted their ways of presenting problems, and he reacted against them. The mutability of things was a given fact to the Milesian thinkers. Their problem was not how things change nor why they change exactly as they do. It was the very circumstance that things do change that was explained by something unchangeable behind it. This was Heraclitus’ point of departure, but he saw things in a new perspective, and thereby he demolished the older framework. It is at the same time characteristic of Heraclitus-as it is of Parmenides, his younger contemporary-that he struggles to make language express the new that was on his mind.
