Logos of Herclitus

In his Vatican fresco The School of Athens, Raphael portrays the great thinkers and teachers of the ages talking and listening to one another. His Heraclitus, however, is a lone thinker staring downward and inward, seated apart from the other philosophers. According to Eva Brann, Heraclitus looks within: “There he finds the Logos, the order that is the cosmos, the world without, whose mouthpiece and scribe he means to be”. The collected work of Heraclitus comprises 131 passages. Some scholars consider them fragments, or even paraphrases of or additions to what Heraclitus originally wrote. Rather than focus on these puzzles of historical scholarship, Eva Brann sets herself the task to understand the thought of Heraclitus as it is found in the passages themselves. Read her account to see why she thinks that “Heraclitus was the first Westerner to ponder how thought and world come to jibe: A Logos that we can hear must be the designer – and the design – of the world.