Abstract

Heraclitus – a byword for transience – was, oddly enough, the first western thinker to guess at the presence of another reality he called ‘Logos’, lying deep within the flux of appearances. Subsequently, Plato canonised the distinction between appearance and reality, and in more recent times Schleiermacher, himself an authoritative translator of Plato, reinvigorated this ancient, seemingly indestructible, and invaluable dichotomy between what appears to be the case, and what is the case.