1001Philosophers

Aristotle vs Heraclitus

Aristotle's metaphysics of substance can be read as a sustained reply to Heraclitean flux. Where Heraclitus saw a world of unceasing change, Aristotle developed a conceptual apparatus designed to identify what persists through change.

At a glance

AristotleHeraclitus
Dates384 BC – 322 BCc. 535 BC – c. 475 BC
NationalityGreekGreek
EraAncientAncient
Movements Peripatetic School, Ancient Greek Philosophy Pre-Socratic, Ancient Greek Philosophy
Profile Aristotle → Heraclitus →

Where they agree

Both took natural change as a central problem for philosophical analysis rather than dismissing it as illusion, and both held that there is a rational structure underlying the flux of perceptual experience. Aristotle treated Heraclitus as a serious predecessor whose views had to be reckoned with rather than ignored.

Where they disagree

Aristotle's distinctions between substance and accident, form and matter, potentiality and actuality, were designed to show that change is intelligible only against a background of persistent substance: it is this thing that takes on a new property, this acorn that becomes an oak. Heraclitus held the opposite — that there is no persistent thing at all, only the becoming itself. Aristotle's reply is that an account of pure becoming cannot even pick out the same river twice, and so cannot say what is changing into what.

Representative quotes

Aristotle

  • “All men by nature desire to know.”

    Metaphysics Book I, 980a.21 : Opening paragraph of Metaphysics | Variant: All men by nature desire knowledge. | The first sentence is in the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 21:10

  • “Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”

    A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies.

  • “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

    Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Heraclitus

  • “You cannot step into the same river twice.”

    ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ

  • “The way up and the way down are one and the same.”

    ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή

  • “Character is destiny.”

    ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων

Continue reading