Catherine Rowett - Heraclitus Quotes

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For Heraclitus, the logos is something that we need to learn to notice if we are to understand the true significance of the world. It manifests itself all around us but, Heraclitus suggests, only a few intelligent people ever realize what is going on.

Catherine Rowett
Plato's metaphysics grew out of that of Parmenides, together with a strong feel for Heraclitus's account of the physical world as a world of incessant change. His ethics were deeply inspired by Socrates, but his views on the soul also pick up on motifs that emerge in Pythagoras.

Catherine Rowett
We have a sense that Heraclitus thrills to the perpetual flow of differences in the world: change is endemic, opposites flip into one another depending on your point of view, fire consumes what was there before and gives back something quite different. Nothing remains: the world exists in its pattern of dying and rising to new life, not in its material remnants. These patterns extend into religion, ethics, politics, and his analysis of language, on all of which he seems to have something to say (though it is often hard to grasp exactly what he means).

Catherine Rowett
Perhaps Heraclitus lived before Parmenides, perhaps he lived after, perhaps he lived at the same time. Whichever way, his sayings cry out to be read in their own right, as a radically anti-materialist project unlike anything previously known. They bitterly resist the attempt to package them along with the pre-Parmenidean thinkers; they flourish in a situation in which we are able to juxtapose them with alternatives, such as Parmenides's world view, for which they may indeed have been a foil.

Catherine Rowett
Everyone who reads Heraclitus (or what is left of Heraclitus) finds his or her own ideas somewhere there. And those who disagree about what Heraclitus meant can argue [...] that what he seems to say is not what he really meant.

Catherine Rowett