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Brief Lives

Heraclitus (c. 500 BC)

Harry Keith lets flow a stream of ideas about permanence and change.

If you’ve never read Heraclitus’s book, then you share something in common with every modern scholar of his work: we only have fragments. Unfortunately, so little of his writing survives that it is difficult to piece together the life and opinions of this intriguing philosopher. This is what makes studying him partly so easy, and partly so difficult: you can read all the surviving fragments in an hour, then puzzle over them for the rest of your life.

We may never understand Heraclitus’s philosophy in detail, but I hope by the end of this article to introduce you to some of the themes that survive, to what recent(ish) philosophers have said about them, and to what we can learn from them today.

Heraclitus was known as ‘The weeping philosopher’.

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