Earliest Group of Ancient Greek Philosophers
While Thales, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus are all legendary early greek philosophers, their conceptions of the world are significantly different. Thales and Pythagoras both focused on the essence of things and believed that the world at heart was unchangeable and operated according to strict mathematical rules that man could ascertain through the use of deductive logic. Heraclitus, on the other hand, believed that everything in the world is in state of flux, and that this meant that "nothing is the same now as it was before, and thus nothing what is now will be the same tomorrow" (Knierim). What is remarkable today is our realization that all three of these great thinkers had their own particular window into the truth: everything is indeed in flux, but the nature of that flux can be discovered through the use of deduction and advanced mathematics.