THE FRAGMENTS OF HERACLITUS
http://www.ou.edu/logos/heraclitus
This project has been made possible with a grant from the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma through its Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program!

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In the fall of my sophomore year, I took an ancient Greek philosophy survey course.  It was a very good class.  Before we got to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we discussed a group of philosophers called the Pre-Socratics.  Apparently, there were philosophers before Socrates!  I had never heard of them before, but I found reading their works quite interesting.  None of their original work remains: the only sources we have for studying them are called fragments.  These 'fragments' are quotations by later authors.  For example, Aristotle will write, "Heraclitus said ... ."  Imagine trying to reconstruct a person's philosophical position out of quotations and paraphrases from other authors.  I found this to be a very interesting undertaking.  We spent one day studying Heraclitus, another day on Parmenides -- a week and a half on the Pre-Socratics as a whole.  I was incredibly interested in learning more about these amazing philosophers, so I began to read some more.

I found very quickly that books were either too shallow or too deep for me as an undergraduate student.  I wanted to really dig into the fragments of Heraclitus myself -- not have someone spoon-feed me information.  I got a lot of different accounts of Heraclitus from the different books I read.  So I decided to start a research project on my own.  I soon realized that the internet would make learning about the fragments of Heraclitus much easier than some of the different books I was using.  At times, I had four different volumes open, with my Greek dictionary and my grammar reference tools in my lap and my computer connected on-line to The Perseus Project. I constantly moved back and forth between all these resources.  It was very inefficient.

So I applied for money to build a web-site that would have all the fragments of Heraclitus with notes and commentary that would be helpful for students like me.  I have spent the ensuing months thinking about the fragments, reading them in Greek and in English, and reading many secondary sources.  I have combined all my efforts into this web-site.  I have made the information contained in this site available in many different formats to benefit as many different users as I could imagine.  Click the 'Using this Site' link on the home page to see how I would recommend using this site, or take the full 'Site Tour' to see what different options are available.

I hope you enjoy learning about Heraclitus as much as I have!

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