THE IMPORTANCE OF HERACLITUS

The idea of a world in constant but ordered change has had an influence on later philosophers. Plato adopted Heraclitus' view, suggesting that the world of our ordinary experience was constantly in change, though subject to ordering principles, ultimately the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The ordering was not complete, so that our world has an element of irrationality that cannot be eliminated. The irrationality is the result of the fact that what is in change cannot be fully understood. A thing in change is not what it was and is not what it will be.

Aristotle also saw the world as ordered change. For things on earth, there was coming into being, going out of being, natural development, and of course change of place, ordinary movement. Above the world, from the moon out to the stars, there is also change, but it is entirely orderly.

G.W.F Hegel (1770-1831) saw the world as in change, possessing a peculiar sort of order, and developing towards oneness. Other nineteenth-century philosophers also concerned themselves with change. Almost always, change was thought to be a kind of imperfection as compared to what does not change.

Starting with the end of the nineteenth century, a new conception of change was developed by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), For them, change was not a sign of incompleteness or irrationality, but simply reality. They thought of things as being really processes, more or less stable events. They claimed that what does not change does not exist. These people were called "process philosophers."
At the same time, another group of philosophers, the Pragmatists, came by a different development of thought to the same conclusion. The real world is change, process. The main members of this group are Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910) and John Dewey (1859-1952).

Heraclitus (probably not from life)

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