![]() ![]() ![]() As Iain McGilchrist writes in his superlative new book The Matter With Things, on this view the world was “composed of a single timeless unchanging unity, in which true creativity, individuation, and history come to be merely illusions, or at least fallings away from an ideal.” 1 Together with their more concrete brethren, these realities were the fundamental currency of whatever it is that we know. What mattered were things-the material and timeless entities of which the universe was composed, and from which could be inferred (thanks to another Greek invention, the definite article) the existence of abstract realities. ![]() Plato, who took the path of Parmenides not Heraclitus, was another who thought that change was a delusion. Parmenides by contrast went so far as to deny the existence of change his celebrated pupil Zeno argued that an arrow could never travel from A to B (and so it follows, as a character in Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers deduced, that Saint Sebastian died of fright). But his vision of eternal flux and movement was contested among the pre-Socratic philosophers. ![]() I n the beginning, Heraclitus contemplated the nature of reality and saw that everything flowed: πάντα ῥ εῖ ( panta rhei), he wrote, cleverly remembering the rule that the neuter plural in Greek takes a singular verb. ![]()
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