Comments on Anderson Brown's Philosophy Blog: Anaximander and Heraclitus

I admire your conclusion - that their description ...

2009-03-19T22:38:00.000-04:00

I admire your conclusion - that their description of nature was dynamic. Unfortunately, when Parmenides, Zeno and Plato work out the details of truth and logic, a dynamic metaphysics becomes logically impossible and indescribable. As a result, we have a very anomalous philosophy of time, which is the "plug", as accountants would say, in our Platonic metaphysics which maintains the appearance of consistency.

It would be interesting to work out a truly dynamic metaphysics in the spirit of Heraclitus or at least to prove that such a model is impossible to express.

I found your comparison between Heraclitus and Ana...

2008-09-05T10:24:00.000-04:00

I found your comparison between Heraclitus and Anaximander interesting. I also remembered a similar comparison being made in McKirihan's (1994) "Philosophy Before Socrates" (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing). After looking it up I found the following. On fragments about oppositions occuring successively (126, 88, 57), McKirihan suggests that the 126 fragment "cold things grow hot, a hot thing cold, a moist thing withers, a parched thing is wetted" could be understood as a commonsense law of nature, basically whatever is cold, also at another time may be hot, and vice versa; however if something is cold at a time, then it cannot be hot at that time, and vice versa. However, to bolster your hypothesis, he also writes, "It (126) may describe the physical functioning of the world. (Hot and cold were prominent in Milesian philosophy [read 'Anaximander's philosophy'] and play a role in Heraclitus' cosmology" (137). While you have taken this hypothesis beyond this comment, I thought you might be interested in this quote.

Hi everybody!Thanks for the great philosophic site...

2008-08-25T08:03:00.000-04:00

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I like your comparison. What we should add to thes...

2008-08-21T23:09:00.000-04:00

I like your comparison. What we should add to these general comments I would think is the thought of Empedocles, from whom we have a rather substantial number of surviving fragments. He too forwards an elemental phusis of four parts, not qualities, but something more elemental: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. These are ever "mixing and separating" driven by two proto forces which move in cycles: Strife and Love (Aphrodite). Because I believe he gives Love the upper hand - both in the cosmic narrative, but also in some sense in the personal katharsis of the soul - so too with Heraclitus he emphasizes a union of opposites.