Pre-Hellenic Thought Folks like Aristotle, Isocrates, and Plato didn't just pop up overnight. Nor were they dropped from a flying saucer. They picked up on the philosophical approaches of those that preceded them and expanded on them. Here are some of those thinkers. Heraclitus, an aristocrat, was the progenitor of the Sophists.
Nothing remains the same even from one moment to the next.
The father of all things is strife. The birth and conservation of all things is due to the conflict of opposites. The Heraclitean doctrine of opposites begins with the State of Becoming . The material substance that makes up what we call things is made up of the conflict between being and non-being. Change is produced through movement from non-being to being.