Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments

This book does not contain Heraclitus' writings in a straight forward manner, instead it will have a paragraph of his writing then pages and pages of commentary, that I skip through. I wish it did not have commentary.

In reply to Ace112223, if you had only the writings of Heraclitus that have survived, you have a pamphlet and not a book. For the vast majority of serious students of ancient philosophy, however, a book of commentary by one of the great classicists of the last half of the Twentieth Century is a volume to be celebrated. You have committed a fallacy many on Amazon fall prey to, reviewing not the book that exists, but the book you wished existed. This simply is a work of commentary by a major authority on the Presocratics, and that is the work that should be reviewed and rated. Instead, you reacted negatively to the book because you did NOT want a commentary. It is hardly fair to Kahn to penalize him for not writing the book you wanted, instead of the book he did. And classical scholarship would be far poorer if he had written your desired book. Instead, this is probably the finest book on Heraclitus ever written in English, and the reason it is so valuable to serious students and scholars is the commentary. Way back in the early 1980s I took a graduate seminar on the Presocraticst Yale. For the course we had to write several short essays on various philosophers, and one of the thinkers I wrote about was Heraclitus, and while I looked at several resources - such as Barnes's THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS, which had just been published, and a variety of essays - far and away the most helpful thing I found, along with Barnes and an essay by Gregory Vlastos, was this book by Kahn. And I don't believe that this has changed. Forty years later Kahn's book remains the best in English on Heraclitus' Fragments. It is the only major work on Heraclitus in English. I just checked the bibliography following the essay in my copy of Curd and Graham's OXFORD HANDBOOK OF PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY, and while a number of newer essays are listed, there are no major books in English. So unless you are both fluent in German, French, or Italian, and can find copies of the major works on Heraclitus in those languages, you are left with only Kahn's highly regarded study.

According to Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus was at his prime (40 years old) in Olympiad 69, 504/503 BC - 501/500 BC, and we are told by Diogenes and earlier by Plato that Heraclitus was from Ephesus. This book is a translation and commentary on the fragments of Heraclitus about nature rather than about man (ethics, the soul, epistemology, politics). The fragments are organized into groups and each fragment is translated with commentary about its transmission and meaning. This is not an introduction to the world view of Heraclitus. We only have short quotations from and testimonia about the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and to make sense of these fragments and testimonia one needs heavy commentary like Kirk gives.I am inspecting the fragments of Heraclitus for statements having to do with astronomy. In the history of philosophy and in popular science writing, there is too much focus on what stuff the sun or stars are made of, or what makes them move (souls?), or about geocentric vs. heliocentric models. There is too little focus on what celestial phenomena were recognized (solstices? ecliptic? what about the Moon's motion and light?) and the mental model of the sky ancient thinkers had. For example, Fragment 6, from Aristotle's Meteorology, is about the sun being nourished by moisture. This is interesting for the history of thought but it has nothing to tell us about how people used the sky actually to do things like determine a direction, location or time. What *is* interesting for the history of astronomy is Aristotle's assertion, "Some of them, indeed, say that this is the cause of the solstices", which tells us that the phenomena of solstices seemed to Aristotle to be known to Heraclitus.

Perhaps it was my copy which was used and incorrectly sent to me and the Ancient Greek not translated and rather an English/ Greek edition but I had to stop reading because I could only understand 30 percent of what was being said due to its reference to the Ancient Greek text without actually fully translating it.I had hoped it would be a translation and discussion of the meaning with actually explaining the original text rather than assuming you already understood.Probably the wrong book for me and really only useful if you have a PHD in Ancient Greek philosophy.I wish to understand his work still however so will find a Heraclitus for dummies instead.

Actually, I thought I was ordering the book by Kirk and Raven of the same name but the later book by G.S. Kirk is fine for my purpose. Kirk and Raven covers the full range of fragments whereas this book covers selected fragments in depth. The analysis and discussion of the sources and possible meaning of the fragments, however, is a tour de force and I have no criticism of his selection.