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Rating: 
Summary: The foundation of all Western thought......
Review: Devoid of all "Slave Morality" influences from Semitic thinking, Heraclitus is pure European thought at its finest. It's usually proclaimed, that all Western philosophies are but a footnote to Plato. I disagree. Even Plato is subjected to Heraclitus. These fragments shine through, and Charles Kahn does an excellent job of giving his opinions about each fragment without forcing them down your throat and proclaiming his opinions as 100% the ONLY way they can be understood (but, in my opinion, he makes a good case for this reasons). After reading these 123 fragments, you'll see that philosophers such as Plato through Hitler among others owe much of their thinking to this one man. An Excellent Read.
Rating:
Summary: The foundation of all Western thought......
Review: Devoid of all "Slave Morality" influences from Semitic thinking, Heraclitus is pure European thought at its finest. It's usually proclaimed, that all Western philosophies are but a footnote to Plato. I disagree. Even Plato is subjected to Heraclitus. These fragments shine through, and Charles Kahn does an excellent job of giving his opinions about each fragment without forcing them down your throat and proclaiming his opinions as 100% the ONLY way they can be understood (but, in my opinion, he makes a good case for this reasons). After reading these 123 fragments, you'll see that philosophers such as Plato through Hitler among others owe much of their thinking to this one man. An Excellent Read.
Rating:
Summary: Inspirational for Certain Philosophers
Review: One of the things that is most interesting to me about this book is the way it illustrates how we can know so much about someone whose main book is not available to us. By writing about nature in a way that emphasized the power of fire, war, and strife, Heraclitus produced a book that was so well known to ancient writers that many of them lifted ideas for their own purposes. This combination of the knowledge that we have from many sources produces a picture of the permutations that basic philosophy is prone to fall prey to in a history which never finds any particular idea useful for long. I find the application of such ideas most interesting in the field of deep politics, where the idea of "killing the killers," mentioned in connection with the riddle which Homer couldn't guess at the time of his death according to the tradition explained in this book, could be related to some modern despicabilities.
Rating:
Summary: Inspirational for Certain Philosophers
Review: One of the things that is most interesting to me about this book is the way it illustrates how we can know so much about someone whose main book is not available to us. By writing about nature in a way that emphasized the power of fire, war, and strife, Heraclitus produced a book that was so well known to ancient writers that many of them lifted ideas for their own purposes. This combination of the knowledge that we have from many sources produces a picture of the permutations that basic philosophy is prone to fall prey to in a history which never finds any particular idea useful for long. I find the application of such ideas most interesting in the field of deep politics, where the idea of "killing the killers," mentioned in connection with the riddle which Homer couldn't guess at the time of his death according to the tradition explained in this book, could be related to some modern despicabilities.
Rating:
Summary: Heraclitus' thought comes to life
Review: The dense language and riddling nature of Heracitus' prose has baffled many of us for the past 2500 years. The approach here taken to Heraclitus' fragments is fascinating. The author points out that only by putting the fragments in context with the way the greeks of the fifth century BC reasoned, Heraclitus' thought may come to life to the modern reader. Unlike today's "rational" thought, the greeks of the fifth century BC were not yet enslaved to deductive thinking and causality, but were quite aware of the self-referent nature of things, of the unending web of interelations that makes up Nature and the Universe. Science exclusively endowed with causality and deduction is very good at finding the hows, but terribly clumsy at finding the whys. This book is definitely recommended to all science people interested not only in learning the hows, but also in understanding the whys.
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