After studying the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, I received a grant to build a Unicode web site containing his texts in Unicode Greek and essays about him.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 Presocratics. 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 Presocratics 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.

Visit Heraclitus Fragments site.