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Originally Posted by mysweety
Some time ago I was going through the book by West "Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient". He says that to understand Heraclitus it is more helpful to read "Brhadaranyaka Upanishad" than the other earlier presocratics. Well I have started on that path by downloading the commentary by Krishnamurti as a pdf and a very well commented French version from
http://www.les-108-upanishads.ch/brihadaranyaka.html.
This is easy to turn into an ebook using for example Sigil.
Was West correct - any opinions, thoughts? |
I just had a quick look at your link, and at the Stanford page on
Heraclitus. Like many ancient Greek philosophers, his work is only known through fragments, which makes interpretation difficult:
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He has been variously judged by ancient and modern commentators to be a material monist or a process philosopher; a scientific cosmologist, a metaphysician, or a mainly 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.
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It seems to me that there may be similarities between the two texts. They do seem to have both a tendency to what I see as a mystic frame of mind, which I'm afraid doesn't interest me much personally, so I'm not really inclined to research this. Have you progressed in your reading since your post? Do you think West is right?