100 Influential Philosophers - Sayed Badar Zaman Shah

7 The 100 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time 7
include not only fuel, flame, and smoke but also the ether
in the upper atmosphere. Part of this air, or pure fire,
“turns to” ocean, presumably as rain, and part of the ocean
turns to earth. Simultaneously, equal masses of earth and
sea everywhere are returning to the respective aspects of sea
and fire. The resulting dynamic equilibrium maintains an
orderly balance in the world. This persistence of unity
despite change is illustrated by Heracleitus’ famous analogy
of life to a river: “Upon those who step into the same rivers
different and ever different waters flow down.” Plato later
took this doctrine to mean that all things are in constant
flux, regardless of how they appear to the senses.
Heracleitus was unpopular in his time and was frequently
scorned by later biographers. His primary contribution
lies in his apprehension of the formal unity of the world of
experience.
Parmenides
(b. c. 515 BCE)
Parmenides was a Greek philosopher from Elea (in
southern Italy) who founded Eleaticism, one of the
leading schools of Greek thought before Socrates. His
general teaching has been diligently reconstructed from
the few surviving fragments of his principal work, a lengthy
three-part verse composition titled On Nature.
Parmenides held that the multiplicity of existing
things, their changing forms and motion, are but an
appearance of a single eternal reality (“Being”), thus giving
rise to the Parmenidean principle that “all is one.” From
this concept of Being, he went on to say that all claims of
change or of non-Being are illogical. Because he introduced
the method of basing claims about appearances on a logical
concept of Being, he is considered one of the founders of
metaphysics.
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