page_title: Heraclitus
section_title: Diogenes Laërtius
hierarchical_section_title: Heraclitus / Life / Floruit / Diogenes Laërtius
context_page_description: Heraclitus of Ephesus son of Bloson, was a pre-Socratic Ionian Greek philosopher, and a native of the city of Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey and then part of the Persian Empire.
  Due to the oracular and paradoxical nature of his philosophy, and his fondness for word play, he was called "The Obscure" even in antiquity. He wrote a single work, On Nature, but the obscurity is made worse by its remaining only in fragments. His cryptic utterances have been the subject of numerous interpretations. He has been seen variously as a "material monist or a process philosopher; a scientific cosmologist, a metaphysician, or mainly a religious thinker; an empiricist, a rationalist, or a mystic; a conventional thinker or a revolutionary; a developer of logic or one who denied the law of non-contradiction; the first genuine philosopher or an anti-intellectual obscurantist."
  He was of distinguished parentage but eschewed his privileged life for a lonely one as a philosopher. Little else is known about his early life and education. He regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom.
context_section_description: The main source for the life of Heraclitus is the notable doxographer Diogenes Laërtius, although some have questioned the validity of his account as "a tissue of Hellenistic anecdotes, most of them obviously fabricated on the basis of statements in the preserved fragments". It also seems the stories about Heraclitus could be invented to illustrate his character as inferred from his writings.
  Diogenes Laërtius said that Heraclitus flourished in the 69th Olympiad, 504–501 BC. Considerations such as that he was probably older than Parmenides, and a contemporary of Pythagoras, makes this time frame a reasonable floruit. His dates of birth and death are based on a life span of 60 years, the age at which Diogenes Laërtius says he died, with this floruit in the middle.
caption: Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor, birthplace of Heraclitus
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