Ancient · c. 535–475 BC
Who did Heraclitus influence?
Students and legacy
The dark philosopher of flux — everything changes, and strife is the father of all.
Heraclitus influenced Georg W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. That is 2 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: RoyFokker, CC BY-SA 4.0 See the whole map
Who was Heraclitus?
Heraclitus came from Ephesus, then part of the Persian Empire. Little is known of his life. He wrote a single book, now in fragments, and his cryptic sayings earned him the name "the obscure"; his gloom made him "the weeping philosopher" beside the laughing Democritus.
His central ideas are the unity of opposites and constant change: the world is always becoming, never simply being, which is the sense of "no man ever steps in the same river twice". He took fire as the basic element and the logos as the order or divine law of the world. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger all read him.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who did Heraclitus influence?
2 thinkers on this map draw directly on Heraclitus.
- Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
Two steps away from Heraclitus
The second generation
- Through Georg W. F. Hegel: Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Alexander Herzen, Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Wilhelm Dilthey, T. H. Green, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kitarō Nishida, György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Jacques Lacan, Alexandre Kojève, Theodor W. Adorno
- Through Friedrich Nietzsche: Lev Shestov, Muhammad Iqbal, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault
Contemporaries of Heraclitus
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Heraclitus, with no direct line between them.
- Theano 6th c. BC
- Confucius 551–479 BC
- Parmenides c. 515–450 BC
Heraclitus by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 0
- Direct followers
- 2
- Thinkers upstream
- 0
- Thinkers downstream
- 68
- Wikipedia languages
- 96 — #15 of 54 among ancient philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Questions about Heraclitus
- Who influenced Heraclitus?
- No earlier thinker on this map is recorded as a direct influence on Heraclitus.
- Who did Heraclitus influence?
- Georg W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche.
- When did Heraclitus live?
- c. 535–475 BC. The map files Heraclitus under the ancient world.
- How rare is the Heraclitus card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Heraclitus in 96 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More ancient philosophers
- Confucius 551–479 BC
- Aristotle 384–322 BC
- Plato c. 428–348 BC
- Socrates c. 470–399 BC
- Pythagoras c. 570–495 BC
- Laozi c. 6th c. BC
- Cicero 106–43 BC
- Thales of Miletus c. 624–546 BC