The Spark That Started a Fire

Heraclitus is an ancient  Greek Philosopher from the city of Ionia. He was born approximately 535 BCE, which is about 65 years before Socrates was born. He was one of the last philosophers of the Ionian school, which was the first school of philosophy in ancient Greece.

Ionian philosophers would understand the universe by insisting there was one main element of reality and all of existence is made from that one element. Heraclitus considered fire as the one primary element that all things are derived from.

Heraclitus also believed reality was in a state of chaos and turmoil, and that things were in constant flux. He uttered the famous phrase "No one steps into the same river twice," as an explanation of existence. He believed chaos to by a fundamental part of nature, and so, concluded that the only constant was inconsistency. He called this constant Logos, which means something akin to guidance in this context. He also believed that strife in the face of chaos was justice and that ethics should be understood from within this struggle.

Parmenides was born approximately 20 years after Heraclitus in the city of Elea. He was the first philosopher of the Eleatic school of ancient Greece. He is considered by some to be the father of logic (or the grandfather, as Aristotle holds that title to many) because he was the first philosopher to understand that philosophy depends on proof of argument rather than statements of belief regarding what reality was made of.

Parmenides insisted that change is impossible and that existence is infinite. Reality is, in actuality, one timeless and unchanging being and our perception of movement is a delusion. This philosophy is subtle and difficult, and should not be understood as a simple explanation of the material world, where particulars of existence don't move. Rather, he was talking about existence as a whole. Parmenides was struggling to construct the first ontological system.

In many ways, Parmenides was responding to Heraclitus. You see, the insistence of Heraclitus is important to the works of Parmenides, as it acts as the foundation in which Parmenides questions.

The great Canadian Philosopher David Gallop once said, "Plato's writings are footnotes to Parmenides." And Alfred Whitehead, the giant process philosopher that helped give the world Principia Mathematica, once exclaimed, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

This was the start of it all; Heraclitus making a claim, which was refuted by Parmenides, where in which he made an argument for reality, which was expanded upon by Plato as he constructed his own philosophy of forms, which was then answered to by the whole of European philosophy.

As a devout lover of Parmenides, I disagree with Heraclitus. However, my love for Heraclitus is deep as well, for, without him, Parmenides would have never had a claim to refute.