Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus is a Pre-Socratic thinker whose work survives only in fragments, yet shaped later ideas of change, opposition, and logos.

He held that all things are in process, and that opposites depend on and turn into one another. Fire often serves as his image of cosmic process: consuming, transforming, and yet enduring through change.

Obscure and oracular in style, Heraclitus remains a source of the Western tradition of becoming, set in sharp contrast to Parmenides’ insistence on the permanence of Being.