HERACLEITUS

Essay by mspassionfruitUniversity, Bachelor'sA, July 2014

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HERACLEITUS

Heraclitus was born 540, Ephesus, in Anatolia and he died 480. He was one of the Greek philosophers. Heraclitus was called "THE RIDDLER". Heraclitus was the riddler because he said things like "All things come into being by conflict of opposites" and "We descend and do not descend into the same river, we are and are not ourselves." Heraclitus was one of the first to seek a universal explanation for nature and man's role within it, an explanation not reliant on the gods. Though he was primarily concerned with explanations of the world around him, Heracleitus also stressed the need for people to live together in social harmony. He complained that most people failed to comprehend the "reason", the universal principle through which all things are interrelated and all natural events occur, and thus lived like dreamers with a false view of the world. A significant manifestation of the logos, Heracleitus claimed, is the underlying connection between opposites.

How things change? Everything changes nothing stays the same especially humans. We start out as an embryo, then a fetus, they a baby, a child, an adult, a senior or elderly person and then we die. Nothing is forever. Leafs on a tree start out small and then they grow and look pretty and then they fall off the tree and sometime desinagrate into the earth. According to Heraclitus, there was no permanent reality except the reality of change; permanence was an illusion of the senses. He taught that all things carried with them their opposites, that death was potential in life, that being and not-being were part of every whole-therefore, the only possible real state was the transitional one of becoming. He believed fire to be the underlying substance of the universe and all other elements transformations of it.