SOURCE: Charles H. Kahn, in an introduction to The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 1-23.

In the following excerpt, Kahn offers a survey of Heraclitus 's historical and intellectual context, paying particular attention to the philosopher's links with Ionian natural philosophy. Kahn maintains that Heraclitus 's "real subject is not the physical world but the human condition, the condition of mortality."

1 The Man, the Time, and the Place

The details of Heraclitus' life are almost completely unknown. Reliable information is limited to the fact that he was a native of Ephesus, on the coast of Asia Minor north of Miletus, and that his father's name was Bloson. His approximate date is fixed by a synchronism with the reign of Darius, 521 to 487 B.C.; his traditional 'acme' in the 69th Olympiad, 504-501 B.C., is probably nothing more than a simplified version of the same...