Sakir asked:

Could you please provide me information about Herakletos, the Philosopher, the son of Ephesus
King?

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Only little is reported of Heraclitus' life. His own writings make it plain that he had nothing but scorn
for the popular mass "For what thought or wisdom have they? They follow the poets and take the
crowd as their teacher, knowing not that there are many bad and few good. For even the best of them
choose one thing above all others, immortal glory among mortals, while most of them are glutted like
beasts" (frag 111), for political leaders, and for most previous writers on philosophy and religion
including Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras and Xenophanes: "Much learning does not teach understanding
— otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus"
(frag 16).

Heraclitus' writings, like those of most pre-Socratics, have survived only in small fragments cited by
other classical authors. These fragments are often dense and paradoxical — therefore Heraclitus is
characterized in the history of philosophy as the obscurephilosopher: While Aristotle complained of
his word order, Socrates said it would take a Delian diver to get to the bottom of his work. In the
following I will relate to the writings of Aristotle.

Aristotle tells us about three of Heraclitus' ideas. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle mentions Heraclitus
with his Milesian predecessors in one breath, saying Heraclitus assumes another single source of
natural substances: fire. But if you take for example, fragment 30, where Heraclitus says "The world,
an entity out of everything, was created by neither gods nor men, but was, is and will be eternally
living fire, regularly becoming ignited and regularly becoming extinguished.", fire doesn't sound to be
the archehere, but a symbol for the eternal change.

Explanation: The point is, that Heraclitus was concerned to improve the Milesian monists Thales,
Anaximander, and Anaximenes, who had attempted to explain the world in terms of oneunderlying
stuff (water, "apeiron", air) and not just to suggest another material source. Heraclitus might have
asked: If everything is really one stuff, how do we make sense of the fact that we observe a
multiplicity of things in the world? And if all these many things are really made of the same stuff, how
can we explain that some things change into other things? That's why Heraclitus declares just change
as the underlying principle.Most famous is this fragment (91), also expressing the primacy of eternal
change: "You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you."

The problem now is, that change, in Heraclitus' philosophy, must imply that reality is riddled with
contradictions, and this is the second of Heraclitus' ideas. For example, "arguing Aristotelean", if a
seed grows into a tree, the seed is not what it was. It was a seed, now it's a tree. However, we must
say that it still is the same thing: we didn't destroy the seed and then bring in a whole new and
different tree. It is still what it was, but then again, it is not what it was. Therefore the tree is and is not
the seed, which violates the law of non-contradiction. Aristotle concludes, "The doctrine of Heraclitus,
which says that everything is and is not, seems to make all things true" (1012a).A more charitable
reading can be found in W. K. Guthrie's A History of Greek Philosophy,Vol. 1, where Guthrie
recognizes three distinct ways that Heraclitus identifies opposites. Very briefly, Heraclitus argues, that
without contraries the world wouldn't even exist: how could there be a day without a night? Or winter
without summer?

The third idea follows from the doctrine of radical flux: the impossibility to have knowledge of the
sensible world. This impossibility caused others (namely, Plato) to develop a "theory of forms" to
justify the possibility of knowledge. The theory of Forms occurred to those who enunciated it because
they were convinced as to the true nature of reality by the doctrine of Heraclitus, [...]" (Met., 1078b)
Heraclitus influenced not only Plato, but also had a keen follower, Cratylus, who took his teacher very
seriously. He stopped talking all together on the grounds that there is literally nothing to talk about,
and it is improper for a man to utter noise.According to Heraclitus we should listen to the logos,the
principle of order and knowledge, which is common to all, but, and here we've come back to the point
we've started from, the many remain ignorant of it, just like sleepwalkers unaware of the reality
around them. You will find more detailed information about Heraclitus in an article of the Routledge
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:

http://www.routledge-ny.com/rep/a055sam.html

and a collection of Heraclitus' fragments at:

http://plato.evansville.edu/public/burnet/ch3a.htm.

Simone Klein