Kant, in the introduction (Part IV ) of his Lectures on Logic, says the following: “When and where the philosophical spirit of the Greeks first erupted, one cannot properly determine.”1 Our consideration of the inception of Occidental thinking does not set out to determine when and where philosophy erupted. We content ourselves with the attempt to experience, from a distance, something of the region of the ground of the ‘inception’ of ‘philosophy’ (i.e., metaphysics). We call those thinkers who think in the region of the inception ‘the inceptual thinkers.’ There are only three such thinkers: Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. In this lecture course, we concern ourselves with only the last mentioned. We would like to experience something of the ‘inception’ in the word of Heraclitus’s.
1 Immanuel Kant, Logik, in Werke (Cass.), VIII, 346.
4 The Inception of Occidental Thinking