Greek philosophy
Heraclitus
c. 535 – c. 475 BCE
The river is his. Read as process philosophy rather than aphorism, Heraclitus claims that things are patterns of change rather than objects that happen to move — the reversal the whole book rests on.
Read alongside: Stay · Sense
- Start with
- Fragments (surviving in later quotation)
- Where they resist the book
- Almost nothing survives intact. Much of what is attributed to him is reconstruction, and the book's reading is one among several defensible ones.
Works worth the time
Fragments
What survives arrives inside other people's quotation. Read a scholarly edition with the context attached rather than a list of aphorisms.
Read further
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Heraclitus ↗
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Heraclitus ↗
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Where Heraclitus appears
Process before substance.
Heraclitus is quoted more often than he is taken seriously. Read as process philosophy rather than aphorism, the river says that things are patterns of change rather than objects that happen to move. Whitehead extends the same claim: what is real is the event, not the thing. An organisation, on this reading, is a rate rather than a structure.