http://www.ou.edu/logos/heraclitus/
This site tour will ask you to open a new window. To navigate between open windows, hold down the Alt key and press TAB.
Click here to open the home page for this site, and use ALT+TAB to return.
This is the home page. From here, you can access many different parts of this web site. First, every time I make an update, I record it on the Update page with the date. The Site Overview is available, as well as an introduction to Heraclitus (coming soon!) and a Bibliography page. But since this is a tour to show what the site can do, so let’s go straight ‘To the Fragments’!
(Use ALT+TAB to move to the
home page. Click 'To the Fragments,' and then use ALT+TAB to return
to this page.)
"The name of the bow (bios) is life (bios), but its work is death."
Click 'By DK Number', and then '48.'
This will load the file for DK B48. I could have used this site to explore this fragment and realize what Heraclitus intended by this cryptic fragment.
Greek Text
The file loads with the
Greek text first. This Greek text I give here either comes from DK's
text, or from an abridgement in Robinson and Johnstone. (If your
computer is not set up to view Unicode fonts, click the 'install Unicode'
link for quick downloading instructions. The process takes less than
five minutes and requires very little memory -- fonts are small!)
The buttons on the left frame
are links to other files for this fragment.
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Resources
Click 'Resoures.' A new window loads with links to helpful on-line resources. Among these are the Perseus Project at Tufts University and John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy at Evansville. These resources are accessible from every fragment, so the user can look up words in a Greek dictionary or get help with grammar. Click <BACK> to return to the fragment. Help
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Translation
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Click 'Translation.' An English translation of the Greek text loads in the white frame. Most of these translations come from John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, which is in the public domain and available on-line at Evansville. In some places, I have edited the translations a little for various reasons. Mostly, I have done this to make the fragments sound better. Bold typing indicates a change. For B48, this translation is my own. Eventually, I will replace all of Burnet's translations with my own. Translations used by other author's are cited and linked to my bibliography page. |
Text Notes
Click 'Text Notes.' A page with notes about the text of the fragment loads in the white frame. This page deals with two major areas: First, I give here variant readings for the text. Since all we have of Heraclitus' work are quotations, it is sometimes difficult to determine what Heraclitus actually said. I give notes describing different scholars views about word choice and how that affects the interpretation. Most of these notes come from Robinson's work or Kahn's work, but in most cases they in turn took this information from other sources. Secondly, I give here interesting things to note about the Greek words. Some fragments have more than one translation, and others have interesting aspects of interpretation that could be missed in English translation. On B48, for example, I explain the relationship between bios (life) and bios (bow).
Transliteration and Beta Code
Many people will not be able
to read the Greek on this site, either because they do not wish to download
the font or because Greek is "all Greek" to them. For these users,
I have provided two different transliterated systems. A transliteration
system takes texts from one alphabet and writes them in another alphabet.
Skip past 'Categories' for a moment, and click 'Transliteration.'
This site uses a slightly different transliteration system than usual.
Click the magnifying glass: the new window
that opens up is a key.
Close the window, and click 'Beta Code.' This transliteration system
is often used for typing Greek in on-line sources. It is how I typed
the Greek on this web site. Click the magnifying class again to open
up this key. These two pages make the Greek texts more accessible
for different users.
Commentary
Click 'Commentary.'
The page that loads has a philosophic commentary for the fragment.
This commentary is my own. Only some of the fragments have individual
commentary at this point. For most of the fragments, links to similar
fragments and overviews for each category suffice. In places where
I discuss the views of another author, a link leads to an annotated bibliography.
Click ‘Kahn.’ Included in the commentary are references to other
fragments by DK number. To access these
fragments, or simply to
navigate through the fragments, click 'DK Index' at the top. Then
choose the appropriate number, e.g. 60. That will load DK B60 in
the window, and that fragment can be explored just as we explored B48.
Use the same method to get back to B48.
Play the Audio
This part of the site does not work yet. I added it for my own amusement, and I hope to add audio readings of all the files at a later time.
Categories
Click 'Categories.'
Listed here are the different categories to which I think B48 belongs.
Clicking a category takes the user to links to other fragments that I have
also decided belong in that category. Click 'Word Play/Ambiguity.'
I will explain the category pages more below. But for now, this allows
the user to look through the fragments for others that relate to this one.
The illustrations and introductory questions allow the user to graphically
see what this category is about, and the lengthy
explanation below explores
the meanings of Heraclitus' fragments. Click on 'B48' to return to
the fragment.
Complete Files by Categories
The bulk of my research effort
went into dividing the fragments into categories. This way, people
could have access to all the fragments that dealt with a particular aspect
of Heraclitus' philosophy. Click the image in the upper left-hand
corner to return to the home page, and then click on 'To the Fragments.'
This time, let's look at 'By Category.' This opens up a separate
window with a list of all the categories. Click 'Philosophers and
Poets.' The page that loads discusses Heraclitus' views about his
predecessors.
Links
The links across the top of the page correspond to all the fragments that mention his predecessors. Each link takes the user to the individual fragments we looked at above. Click 'B104' for an example. Click on 'Translation' to read this fragment. His attitude towards the poets was not very positive. A person could then look through this fragment as we looked through B48 above, looking at the Greek text and text notes, to see if anything interesting is going on in the text.
Multiple Categories
Each fragment can be put
into multiple categories. This fragment, B104, fits into three categories.
This is one of the advantages to using hypertext for publishing the fragments.
In a book, each fragment can only be listed once. Editors of books
have to make choices about how to arrange the fragments -- by categories,
by DK number, or by the order they may have actually appeared in Heraclitus'
text. When putting the fragments into a book by categories, each
fragment can only fit into one
category. This makes
the categories smaller and less comprehensive. Listing fragments
by DK number is a great idea for reference, but it makes the fragments
seem disjointed. Kahn tried to reconstruct the order of the fragments
in Heraclitus' original work; this is a great idea for reading the fragments,
but it does not help students put ideas and concepts together that are
scattered throughout the work. His new order also made his book too
inefficient for reference. On the web, categories can overlap, giving
a more complete and inter-connected picture of Heraclitus. Click
'Philosophers and Poets' to return to that category page.
| Questions
Each category page has a series of questions that will be answered or explored in the fragments for that category. These questions are a quick way for users to tell if this is a category that interests them or not. |
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Article
Each category has a brief article that discusses the fragments and category in question. It provides links to other categories, which helps exhibit the uniformity in Heraclitus' view. The way the DK ordered the fragments gives them a sense of disjointedness and isolation, but Kahn and others argue that the views of Heraclitus form a complete and consistent world picture. I saw this clearly when I began writing the articles for each category and found that I could not help but cross-reference the categories and fragments together. Links to individual fragments outside the category also helped create a comprehensive picture of Heraclitus that any arrangement in a printed book would have hidden. These articles are not intended to be works of great and new scholarship, but rather general introductions. Students of Heraclitus need to be familiar with the fragments and the general layout of his system before they dive into the secondary literature of scholarly views and opinions about the details – this site helps them do just that.
This Category structure is very useful for two different methods of study. A user could go through all the fragments of a category to get a good handle on what evidence there is for each view. Reading an article, thinking about the questions, and reading through all the fragments one by one (all the while enjoying the beautiful images) provide a great summary of one position. But user could also go through all the categories of a fragment to get a good handle on what role that fragment plays in the whole system. Click 'B106.' This loads the complete files for fragment 106. Click 'Translation' to read the fragment. Then click 'Categories.' This fragment belongs to five categories. Going through these one by one, thinking about the questions and reading the articles -- maybe even browsing briefly through some of the other fragments -- gives the user a good handle on fragment 106.
Individual Files
The features mentioned thus far are intended for users who do not have
any knowledge of Heraclitus or access to the fragments. For many
users, this will not be the case. In order to make this site more
useful to any user, I have included ways to view all the files individually.
Part of the intellectual power used in creating a site like this is coming
up with a way to organize all the material that makes it easy to reuse
that same material. HTML and frames work provide many different ways
to organize the translations, the text notes, the Greek texts, and all
the other files. In a book, the author has to make many limiting
choices. Should he put all the fragments together, followed by a
commentary? Or should he put a fragment, then some commentary, a
fragment, and then some more commentary? It depends on who the audience
is, of course. What about Greek texts? Should the Greek and
English be on opposite sides of facing pages, or one on top of the other,
or no Greek at all? I have different editions of the fragments that
do it differently. HTML makes it possible to do all of them!
Click on the Heraclitus logo in the upper left-hand corner to take you
back to the home page. Then click 'To the fragments.' We have
explored the two ways to explore the complete files, and now let's look
at the individual files.
| First, imagine that a student is reading Heraclitus for a philosophy class. They know Greek, but the textbook just gives the fragments in English. A student like this may want to know what Greek work is being translated. For example, |  |
"Men are sure that [Hesiod] he knew very many things, he who did not know day and night: they are one" (B57).
These two uses of know are
different words in the Greek, and this is very important to understanding
Heraclitus' view of
cognition. Only by
looking at the Greek text could one see the difference and its significance.
Click 'Greek Texts' under Single
Files. The page the
loads uses the same files that the complete files use. Click 'B48'
and the same file will load that we saw
earlier.
Other users may be reading a commentary or article on Heraclitus. Others users might see B51 in a introductory textbook and wonder what a certain footnote might mean.
What does “*Reading
palintropos here” mean? For this, the student would
want to consult the text notes. Click, 'Fragments' at the top of
the lower left frame, and click 'Text Notes' under single files.
This loads a very similar page to the last one, but it loads all the text
note files (including the text notes we looked at under B48). Click
'B51' and we get a very helpful explanation of what the footnote means.
I have made all the individual files available in this way. For a
person only interested
in one file per fragment
(say, the translations), this method of navigation is much easier and much
more efficient.
Even scholars could find this site useful. If a scholar were reading an article on Heraclitus that cited fragment numbers but did not quote them, or contained a footnote with references like "but see in contrast B54," this site could be used to quickly reference those fragments. These scholars might just need to see an English translation to remember which fragment B54 is. Or one scholar may give a different textual reading without citing the other reading, and a quick look at the text notes will give another reading. Looking by categories could also help a scholar find a particular fragment for which no quick reference is on hand.
Framed Sets
A number of users would find sets of two files most useful. Click 'Fragments' and then 'Greek Texts with English Translations.' The page that loads is similar, except that it has two places for files to load. Move the arrow over the middle frame bar, click on it, and drag it down. This will hide the English translation. Now click on 'B1.' A student who is still learning Greek now has a Greek text in front of them, with an English translation to help when she gets stuck. Slide the bar up to reveal the English translation. Some users will want to read the English translations of the fragments, though they know Greek. Slide the bar all the way up. Click on 'B2.' After reading the fragment in English, this user might ask herself, "Does Heraclitus use φρόνησις or σοφίηfor wisdom in this fragment?" Slide the bar down, and a Greek reader would realize that the answer is φρόνησις.
Many users will not know Greek, but will want to understand the complexity of the textual problems. Click 'Fragments' and then 'English Translation with Text Notes.' Once again, it is the same type of page. Click 'B1.' The text notes were designed to be useful when looking at the Greek text or the English translation. A person who knows no Greek could figure out what the issue is. Click 'B51,' which we looked at above. Here we see a difference in translation, depending on which reading of the text one takes.
I found the fragments of
Heraclitus very inaccessible to students interested in going beyond the
first step of a survey course. Most anthologies or histories of philosophy
(like KSR or Guthrie's) tell you what one scholar thinks, but these do
not raise the essential issues about textual problems or different interpretations.
Editions of the fragments are great (like Robinson's or Kahn's), but these
often deal with fragments one at a time and not as a collected issue.
By digging through different commentaries and anthologies for over a year,
I was able to find and reproduce the information that students need to
leave the first step and begin to interpret Heraclitus in a scholarly way
for themselves. And for anyone else with any other goals for reading
Heraclitus, I have provided a web site that makes all my work available
through many different means for many different purposes.