ABSTRACT
When, in his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel came to Heraclitus, he was moved to an extravagant effusion: ‘Here we see land! There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic.’ A prominent opponent of Hegelianism is no less effusive: Heraclitus’ fragments, far from adumbrating teutonic dialectics, reveal ‘a thinker of unsurpassed power and originality’, a Greek Wittgenstein. 1 The truth is that Heraclitus attracts exegetes as an empty jampot wasps; and each new wasp discerns traces of his own favourite flavour.
