And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought

to you Heraclitus of Ephesus is, you might say, the ultimate pre-Socratic.

He brings together many of the features we associate with Greek philosophy before Socrates, Plato,

and Aristotle came along.

For instance, most of the thinkers we've looked at in previous episodes wanted to reduce the

whole Cosmos to one fundamental principle.

Thales chooses water, Anaximines chooses air, an aximander has his more abstract principle, the unlimited.

Heraclitus too has his basic element, namely fire.

Another example, these thinkers also wanted to explain change and opposition, and once

Heraclitus comes along, their forays in this direction seem like a mere prologue to his theory

of the unity of opposites. But of course the most basic thing about the

pre-secratics is that we read only fragments of their thought. We're left with

intriguing quotations and paraphrases from later authors.

But Heraclitus actually wrote in fragments.

Heraclitus's body of work is not unlike that of a comedian from the 1950s.

It consists mostly of one-liners.

Heraclitus did apparently write a book.

Like most of the pre-Socratic's, he's credited with having written a work called On Nature.

That title doesn't mean he was a natural scientist or that he was only a natural scientist.

The Greek word for nature is Fussis, which is where we get the word physics.

But when it was used by these early thinkers, it could have a very broad meaning.

Nature was just everything there was, and that was the topic of the book Heraclitus wrote.

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