# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/heraclitus
# Generated: 2026-08-31T15:46:20.043Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/heraclitus"
name: "Heraclitus"
slug: "heraclitus"
description: "He wrote in riddles so knotted that ancient readers called him \"the obscure\" and \"the dark.\" His one book survives only in fragments, but the core claim — everything flows, you can't step in the same river twice — runs underneath twenty-five centuries of Western thought."
tagline: "Greek philosopher (late 6th/early 5th-century BC)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Ca'_Rezzonico_-_Eraclito_1705_-_Giuseppe_Torretti.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "Turkey"
  isoCode: "TR"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "-535"
deathDate: "-470"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           76.3
  momentum:             0
  historical:           26.254068
  currentAttention:     11.75
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  22
  category: 74
tags:
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    slug: "academics"
  - name: "Academic"
    slug: "academic"
  - name: "Philosophy"
    slug: "philosophy"
  - name: "Literature"
    slug: "literature"
  - name: "Physics"
    slug: "physics"
  - name: "Ancient History"
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    title: "Heraclito"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Efesli Heraklit"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Heraklit"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Heraclit"
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    title: "ھێراکلیتوس"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Eraclitu"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Hérakleitos"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Heraklit"
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    title: "Wikiquote"
    type:  "WEBSITE"
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    title: "Wikiquote"
    type:  "WEBSITE"
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    title: "Wikiquote"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Heraclitus lived around 500 BC in Ephesus, then under Persian rule, and wrote a single work now lost except for scattered pieces. Even in antiquity his paradoxes and cryptic epigrams made him hard to parse; his temperament didn't help — contemporaries thought him arrogant, depressed, misanthropic, earning him the nickname "the weeping philosopher" in contrast to Democritus the laughing one. His philosophy turned on the unity of opposites and the primacy of change: the world constantly in flux, always becoming, never static being, with harmony found in strife itself. He believed fire was the fundamental element and that logos — reason or divine law — gave structure to the ceaseless transformation. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger: all carried forward arguments first sketched in his gnomic lines.