This dissertation offers a new account of the context in which Heraclitus develops his views on meaning and knowledge. The frame of mythic thinking affords insight into important dimensions of Heraclitus's thought, particularly the simultaneous holism and fragmentation that characterized his ideas on the world and on wisdom. I suggest that Heraclitus' concept of the xynos logos, or shared thinking, captures the holistic-fragmented nature of the social bond perfectly. Because this xynos logos only happens where thought ...
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This dissertation offers a new account of the context in which Heraclitus develops his views on meaning and knowledge. The frame of mythic thinking affords insight into important dimensions of Heraclitus's thought, particularly the simultaneous holism and fragmentation that characterized his ideas on the world and on wisdom. I suggest that Heraclitus' concept of the xynos logos, or shared thinking, captures the holistic-fragmented nature of the social bond perfectly. Because this xynos logos only happens where thought gathers, I show how four sites of this gathering---the psyche, the polis, the cosmos, and the Sacred---are intended in a number of pivotal fragments of Heraclitus. A close reading suggests we should not take the continuity of these sites of thinking as passive or stable; instead, each site is as arising only out of conflict. Thus, we discover that the signature Heraclitean concept of the agon is present in the fragments that describe the four sites of the xynos logos. In a concluding discussion, I argue that Heraclitus's unique aphoristic style also captures this fragmentation within the whole, which allows (and has allowed) future interpreters continually and fruitfully to re-interpret his fragments. The fragments cannot be exhausted of meaning because they capture the very essence of meaning, fragmentation, within. Thus, philosophy should not wish away conflict and competition in its definitions of the world, but see conflict as the basis of any world it might hope to define.
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