page_title: Heraclitus
section_title: Floruit
hierarchical_section_title: Heraclitus / Life / Floruit
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Busto di Pitagora. Copia romana di originale greco. Musei Capitolini, Roma.Brüste des Philosophen Pythagoras von Samos in den Kapitolinischen Museen, de:Palazzo Nuovo; de:Rom Fotograf oder Zeichner: Galilea Copyright Status: de:GNU Freie Dokumentationslizenz
context_page_description: Heraclitus of Ephesus son of Bloson, was a pre-Socratic Ionian Greek philosopher, and a native of the city of Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey and then part of the Persian Empire.
  Due to the oracular and paradoxical nature of his philosophy, and his fondness for word play, he was called "The Obscure" even in antiquity. He wrote a single work, On Nature, but the obscurity is made worse by its remaining only in fragments. His cryptic utterances have been the subject of numerous interpretations. He has been seen variously as a "material monist or a process philosopher; a scientific cosmologist, a metaphysician, or mainly a religious thinker; an empiricist, a rationalist, or a mystic; a conventional thinker or a revolutionary; a developer of logic or one who denied the law of non-contradiction; the first genuine philosopher or an anti-intellectual obscurantist."
  He was of distinguished parentage but eschewed his privileged life for a lonely one as a philosopher. Little else is known about his early life and education. He regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom.
context_section_description: The dates for Heraclitus are uncertain. Scholars have generally believed that either Parmenides was responding to Heraclitus, or Heraclitus to Parmenides, though opinion on who was responding to whom has varied over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. Most figure Parmenides was responding to Heraclitus, and therefore Heraclitus was the older of the two. Heraclitus is silent on Parmenides, yet Parmenides seems possibly to refer to him, and Heraclitus refers to the likes of Pythagoras.
caption: Heraclitus disliked Pythagoras.
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