For Aristotle, the main thing to grasp about a child is what it is not – a creature that has not yet reached the age of reason: childish. But Heraclitus had exploited that ‘deficit’ view of childhood to create characteristic paradoxes in which he exhibits children as however also wiser and sharper than adults. In one of his most enigmatic aphorisms (Fr. 52), he represents the dynamism that propels and sustains us right through life as that of a child at play. After analysis of that paradox and other Heraclitean sayings about children, the chapter turns to Plato’s interest in children and their play, and to his no less paradoxical thesis in the Laws that what, if anything, is truly serious in human life is playful activity, conceived as participation in the ordered play of the gods. We see here an anticipation of Huizinga’s thesis (in Homo Ludens) that in application of the concept of play lies the route to understanding not only children’s games and the place of sport in the lives of adults, but all of what may be regarded as the higher forms of culture, not least law and religious ritual.

Socrates provides here an eschatological account that is thoroughly integrated into a novel cosmology. I argue that the Phaedo’s cosmology draws on and reflects the account of forms and ordinary objects that Socrates presented over the course of the Phaedo. The result is a distinctly Platonic account of the cosmos and the afterlife, one that treats the best parts of the cosmos as form-like and the worst parts as the source of flux. How we live now determines whether after death we will live in a more form-like or flux-like area; this dwelling, in turn, determines whether our souls are benefited or harmed in the afterlife. Since Socrates does not suggest in the Phaedo that any god is responsible for the cosmos, I argue that he avoids needing to explain why our souls can be harmed in the afterlife. In the secondary literature, this section of the dialogue is universally called “the myth,” which has led to treating the entirety of his account as having the same epistemic status. I argue instead that the account has five distinct stages, only the fifth of which Socrates calls a “myth” (muthos).

Ancient Greece provided the setting for the first detailed, recorded hypotheses about the causes of human activity. In the search for first principles of life, tentative explanations included: The naturalistic orientation of the Ionian physicists Democritus, Heraclitus, and Parmenides looked to some basic physical element in nature as this first principle. A biological orientation, developed by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Empedocles, held that bodily physiology is the key. Pythagoras held that life is transcendent of the material world and found in the essential coherence of mathematical relationships. The Sophists posited a pragmatic orientation that denied the value of trying to seek out first principles, relying instead on observations of life as it is lived. Finally, Anaxagoras and Socrates, rejecting the Sophists, proposed the existence of a soul that defines humanity. This humanistic orientation developed the notion of the spiritual soul that possesses the unique human capabilities of the intellect and the will. The soul was elaborated as the central element in the interpretation of life offered by Plato and Aristotle. By the end of the Greek era the critical themes and issues of psychology as well as the methodological approaches were well identified and structured.

A conceptual foundation for a process approach in psychology is provided, including the characteristics of a ‘process’ and a process ontology (or metaphysics) and its philosophical roots. We describe how this approach contrasts substantialism and a substance ontology. Here, we introduce what our envisioned process-approach implies for realism, where we discuss the stance that the construal of reality is constructed. With this, we position ourselves as critical realists.

A conceptual foundation for a process approach in psychology is provided, including the characteristics of a ‘process’ and a process ontology (or metaphysics) and its philosophical roots. We describe how this approach contrasts substantialism and a substance ontology. Here, we introduce what our envisioned process-approach implies for realism, where we discuss the stance that the construal of reality is constructed. With this, we position ourselves as critical realists.

We begin by surveying a rift that runs through the history of philosophy. On the one side stand those philosophers who denigrate conflict as a burden on human existence; on the other stand those who praise it as a productive, strengthening mode of relation. The goal of this book is to elucidate Nietzsche’s contribution to this debate. With this end in mind, we make a brief survey of the intellectual context that informs his unique understanding of conflict. We then turn to some of the key problems that face us in our attempt to extract a coherent philosophical viewpoint from his writings on this topic. First, his terminology is prima facie ambiguous, and it is often unclear what he means when he uses the vocabulary of conflict. Second, across different texts he can be found to positively and negatively value almost all subspecies of conflict. Third, commentators tend to focus on either the hard or the soft – that is, either the violent or nonviolent – aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy. This gives the impression of there being a contradiction in his normative stance toward conflict. I close by giving an outline of the book and how it resolves these various tensions.

Turning the spotlight onto Celsus as philosopher, this chapter examines his textual use of Heraclitus and Plato, especially when tracing the pedigree of the Alēthēs Logos. His anti-Christian Platonism is compared to Plutarch’s anti-Stoic reception of the New Academy.

Language incarnates the structurally absent sense or meaning of the mind in the presence of concrete, sensory signifiers. Dante displays the wholeness of sense in the fragmentary form of letters and even exacerbates their disintegration. So eternity appears as broken in time. Techniques of ekphrasis play with the discrepancy between different sensory modalities, bringing out their inevitable incompleteness, in order to open a perspective on the unrepresentable. However, the divine Logos ever since Heraclitus has been apprehended as a binding together of all things in making Being manifest, as Heidegger shows. The λέγειν or tying–binding that is the essence of language also for Dante (Convivio IV. vi. 3–4), is revealed through the historicality of language as something transcending, commanding, and mastering all possible human acts. The root sense of the Logos as tying and binding (legare) lies at the heart of Dante’s sense of the poet as binder (auieo) tying all things together through vowels as the ties between letters composing words. These figures evoke the already gathered Gathering that conditions the very possibility of history and event in their radical possibility as disclosure (aletheia). The reader gathers (leggere) what is gathered together already in Scripture, as well as in the world through the Logos revealed as universal Justice.

Marginalia in Brecht’s own copies of Unter dem Banner des Marxismus create a picture of his studies, between 1927 and 1934, in response to Lenin's call, issued in 1922, for a study of Hegelian dialectics "from a materialist standpoint." Taken together with their marginalia and the primary sources they cite, the articles by W. Adoratski, A. Deborin, and Wilhelm Reich published between 1925 and 1930 characterize the environment in which Brecht developed his understanding of dialectics and his aesthetics of epic theater.The intellectual underpinnings of this aesthetics, this chapter suggests, entail at least three concepts that are useful for epic theater’s anti-illusionist purposes: cause and effect (and its reversal) in history, including theater history; the relation of art (a material product of the “thinking brain”) to reality ("Art follows [reflects, contradicts] reality" – Brecht); and the dynamic in untenable antagonisms that, once recognized, portends their resolution (class struggle). Following Brecht’s close reading of these distinctions may help clarify the place in Brecht's theater of “militant materialism” and Lenin’s reflection theory of knowledge.

This study examines the evidence for the celestial afterlife in Greek philosophy before Plato. Starting from Plato’s Phaedo myth, where we find evidence for three levels of life for souls (our level, the ‘aithêr-dwellers’ above us, and, above that, a more mysterious third level), it argues that such a stratified cosmos was not original to Plato, but can be found in certain of his predecessors. The two best-documented instances of it occur in Heraclitus and the new, Strasbourg papyrus of Empedocles. Both thinkers, in attempting to frame the place of soul in the order of nature, also adopt a stratified, hierarchical cosmic scheme, with rewards and demotions along the vertical axis. But they also thereby take up positions on the nature of soul: What stuff is it made of? Is it (essentially) immortal or not? And if not, can its immortality be secured? Against Plato’s later doctrine of an essentially immortal soul, both conceive of soul as somehow physical and, for different reasons, appear to deny its full or essential immortality.

When the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus compared the cosmos to a posset of barley, cheese and wine (kukeōn) whose ingredients separated if they were not stirred, he spawned other alimentary images for states of many-in-oneness, from variegated poetry to modern multicultural societies. This chapter explores the reception of Heraclitus’ image in later Greek and Latin literature. Plautus’ cook-figures and culinary neologisms have been read as analogues for the poet’s versatile reassembly of Greek culture, while an epic pun in Virgil’s Aeneid frames as “child’s play” a special moment in etymological, culinary and territorial history. In the pseudo-Virgilian Moretum, a peasant’s miniature cosmos takes shape, culminating in the production of a garlic- and herb-flavoured cheese whose many-in-oneness gave a motto to the United States of America (e pluribus unum). At Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis, dishes based on verbal and visual puns reinforce the freedmen’s liminal identity. Culinary conglomerates have repeatedly transcended their ludic, extemporized contexts to serve the politics and aesthetics of diversity, from antiquity to modern times.

Chapter 5 of De mundo is markedly different from the preceding chapters examining technical details of astronomy, geography and meteorology. Chapter 5 takes an overall survey, presenting a view of the whole cosmos as a unified, well-ordered, magnificent and eternal whole – a true kosmos. Chapter 5 can be divided into three parts: the first introduces the Heraclitean principle of the harmony of opposites (396a33–b22), the second shows how this principle applies to the cosmos (396b23–397a5), and the third argues that the cosmos, built on this principle, is majestic and indestructible (397a5–b8). The detailed analysis of each part is accompanied with an attempt to position this text against the views of other Hellenistic philosophical schools, of the Epicureans and the Stoics as well as the Platonists. Having set forth the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the cosmos, it was important for the author of De mundo to show that this does not undermine the beauty and teleological order of the world nor does it remove the need for God, thus setting the stage for Chapter 6.

A large part of the history of the reception and interpretation of Homer takes the form of allegorical interpretation. In the West, the role of allegory is greatest in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but various techniques of allegorical interpretation can be traced to the earliest commentary on Homer in the Archaic period.

I argue that the concept of scientific explanation constitutes one of McCarthy’s central concerns in the Border Trilogy and that classical thought can be utilized to show that his position is remarkably similar to the Pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus. I show that both McCarthy and Heraclitus share a desire to reject the ontological reductionism of naturalism, yet at the same time avoid the ontological dualism of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. The case for McCarthy’s Heracliteanism is made by analyzing his 2017 piece on the origin of language, “The Kekule Problem: Where Did Language Come From?” I conclude that the position put forth in the first non-fiction piece of McCarthy’s career offers a framework for interpreting the central concerns of the Border Trilogy that is decidedly Heraclitean.

The 'Introduction' contextualizes the ancient notion of kosmos (which implies arrangement through forces of opposition, equilibrium or measure) with the twentieth-century notion of 'system' as understood by Van Bertalanffy and Lazlo and the nineteenth-century concept of 'cosmos' as configured by Alexander von Humboldt. It also traces the biref history of 'cosmos' from its first appearance in the English language, in the twelfth-century poetic commentary on the Bible, Ormulum. Finally, it summarizes the contributions that are to follow in the volume.