Abstract
This paper offers a new reading of Heraclitus fragment B90 (Diels-Kranz). It argues that we can enrich our understanding of the fragment by reading it, not as a primitive analogy, but as a skillful simile grounded both in the poetic tradition and in the cultural context that would have conditioned its significance for Heraclitus and his audience. Read in this way, B90’s evocation of a cosmos whose common measure parallels the common measure of the polis’ marketplace is not simply a source of cosmological doctrine. It is also an epistemic challenge that threatens to undermine the very possibility of cosmology.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Heraclitus on the Question of a Common Measure
- From Zeno ad infinitum: Iterative Reasonings in Early Greek Philosophy
- Between Poetry, Philosophy and Medicine: Body, Soul and Dreams in Pindar, Heraclitus and the Hippocratic On Regimen.
- Reconsidering the Essential Nature and Indestructibility of the Soul in the Affinity Argument of the Phaedo
- Believing for Practical Reasons in Plato’s Gorgias
- Aristotle as an Astronomer? Sosigenes’ Account of Metaphysics Λ.8
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Heraclitus on the Question of a Common Measure
- From Zeno ad infinitum: Iterative Reasonings in Early Greek Philosophy
- Between Poetry, Philosophy and Medicine: Body, Soul and Dreams in Pindar, Heraclitus and the Hippocratic On Regimen.
- Reconsidering the Essential Nature and Indestructibility of the Soul in the Affinity Argument of the Phaedo
- Believing for Practical Reasons in Plato’s Gorgias
- Aristotle as an Astronomer? Sosigenes’ Account of Metaphysics Λ.8