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Looking at the page history now, I see that there were two substantial paragraphs added, unannounced and anonymously, already in 2022:
revision 10, by “Anonymous” in May 2022
revision 11, by “Anonymous” in June 2022
and now
Since there are many claims in these added paragraphs, and apparently a desire to refute other claims, I suggest we meticulously source everything so that the reader can come to their own conclusion.
To that end I have added (here) reference to
and started to extract some direct quotes from it, in a new section “Diogenes Laertius on Heraclitus” (here, though most brief for the moment).
The foremost impression from this is that there is not much at all known about what Heraclitus actually said (and less still that would strike us as worthwhile, leaving just a small handful of half-sentences to go by), nor even all that much of what Diogenes Laërtius wrote, so that it may be misleading about the subject matter to give all too lengthy discussions of it.
Three relevant lines of Heraclitus’ thinking, that I spot from Diogenes account are these:
[1.] this one thing is wisdom, to understand thought, as that which guides all the world everywhere.
and
[2.] All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream.
and
[3.] Change he called a pathway up and down, and this determines the birth of the world.
Little to go by as this is, it does seem to fully justify the single brief claim that our entry made before the recent extensive edits, which was:
Voiced thoughts similar to the unity of opposites later promoted by Hegel
What I admittedly don’t quite see is sourced justification for many claims that now appear in the lengthy Idea-section after these extensive edits.
For example, it seems that you added the claim that:
The Heraclitean Logos considers thought to be an epiphenomenon of matter: the Hegelian Absolute considers matter to be nothing more than a residue of thought.
What would be a source on which this claim is based? Taken at face value, it seems to actually contradict the item [1.] above, quoted from Diogenes Laërtius.
Later your paragraph claims that:
Heraclitus never used the word ‘opposite’ anywhere in his fragments
But searching our primary secondary source, so to say, Diogenes Lartius, for “opposite” yields a couple of hits, all of which supporting the idea that the concept of opposites did play a key role in Heraclitus’ lore, to the extent that we can say anything about these matters, through the mists of time.
A little later you write:
Heraclitus does indeed usually refer to an object changing between one state and its opposite,
I have trouble seeing how we can say that Heraclitus refers to anything “usually”: the word gives the misleading impression that there is a substantial corpus, which there is not.
There is further lines from your paragraph that I feel uneasy with, but I leave it at that. I think the entry would best served by some brevity, given the little substance there is about its subject matter.
For example, lines in your paragraph like
He never says the Fire can change like from a rock to what is absolutely not a rock.
seem to try to force a debate on a subject matter which does not support (nor deserve) it.
Just not to forget:
Looking at the page history now, I see that there were two substantial paragraphs added, unannounced and anonymously, already in 2022:
revision 10, by “Anonymous” in May 2022
revision 11, by “Anonymous” in June 2022
and now
- revision 12 by you (thanks for announcing it on the nForum!)
Since there are many claims in these added paragraphs, and apparently a desire to refute other claims, I suggest we meticulously source everything so that the reader can come to their own conclusion.
I am inclined to delete all three of these additions, since the many claims they make are all un-referenced and many seem dubious. I’d be happy to add such claims back in if accompanied by references supprting them.
Following #4 and #5 above, I have deleted the additions from
revision 10, by “Anonymous” in May 2022
revision 11, by “Anonymous” in June 2022
revision 12, by “Noah Bernes” in March 2023
(happy to add back in any claim that is supported by a reference).
Kept the small paragraph (here) which used to be there before these edits, adjusted by more specific pointers to the references.
Added doi and free RG pdf link for Lambek’s paper
- {#Lambek} Joachim Lambek, The Influence of Heraclitus on Modern Mathematics, In Scientific Philosophy Today: Essays in Honor of Mario Bunge, edited by Joseph Agassi and Robert S Cohen, 111–21. Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co. (1981) doi:10.1007/978-94-009-8462-2_6, ResearchGate pdf
completed the publication data for this item and added link to the journal’s page:
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