Miscellaneous Encyclopedia Articles by Anthony F. Beavers

Heraclitus of Ephesus

Born: c. 540 BCE in Ephesus - Heraclitus, also known as “the Riddler” and “the Obscure,” was the eldest son of Bloson and member of a leading aristocratic family of Ephesus, the same town made famous by Saint Paul’s letter. He was a loner with a general distaste for mobs. Consequently, he had no pupils, though a small book that he wrote had a rich tradition of its own and attracted many followers; the Stoics recognized it as the source of their doctrines. All that survives of this book is a series of quotations that scholars have been able to extract from other sources and that reveal an enigmatic and oracular style, perhaps adopted by Heraclitus to protect its true contents from commoners. Owing to its obscurity, the book engendered many anecdotes about its author, most of them intending to malign him, and so it is difficult to know much about his life and character that is reliable. It is equally difficult to discern the details of his true thought.

Heraclitus is mostly known for his notion that “one can and cannot step in the same river twice,” thereby raising problems of identity, persistence and change that will become hallmarks of the Western philosophical tradition. However, he also had a passing interest in cosmology, though it seems that his observations were made to suit his philosophical interests and were mere modifications of earlier mythological views, rather than being based on sound empirical study.

According to Heraclitus, the sun was an inverted bowl that floated across the sky collecting vapors (or exhalations) that arose from land and sea. The vapors from the land were warm and dry, igniting in the bowl and causing it to rise high in the sky. But the vapors from the sea were cold and moist, thereby extinguishing the fire in the bowl, causing it to set over the sea in the West. This process would be repeated again the next day. Like the sun, the moon and stars were also bowls, the stars glowing lighter because they were further away from the observer and the moon glowing lighter because it collected impure vapors. Eclipses of the sun and moon and the phases of the moon were explained by the notion that the pertinent bowls would turn away from the earth from time to time. Heraclitus gave no account of the composition of the bowls themselves, though respecting the bowl of the sun he reputedly said that “its breadth is the length of a human foot” and that “it is of the size that it appears to be.”

Bibliogrpahy

Guthrie, W. K. C. “Heraclitus.” Chapter 7 in A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. 1. The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962. (Still the reigning comprehensive study of ancient Greek philosophy.)

Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. (An authoritative study of Heraclitus’ thought based on the fragments.

Kirk, G. S., Raven, J. E. and Schofield, M. “Heraclitus of Ephesus.” Chapter 6 in The Presocratic Philosophers, 2^nd Ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. (The standard single volume work on Presocratic thought.)

Written for the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers