Heraclitus famously believed in the equality of opposites, as do I. Would the truth of the equality of opposites have any significant implications for reason and logic?
.. Did Heraclitus believe in the identity of opposites? I do not think so. He is popularly quoted as having said,
No man ever steps in the same river twice.
But what he actually said is quite different,
We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.
.. If so, the opposites
- We often step into the same river.
and
- We never step into the same river.
are both true, but they are not identical: they are true concerning different relations. “River” means different things in each sentence