Shared questions
- What underlying principles can explain a changing natural world without recourse to mythic genealogy alone?
Internal disagreements
- Whether the basic reality is one or many, stable or changing, and accessible through sense experience or reason.
Key texts
- The fragments of the early Greek thinkers — Collected and numbered by Diels and Kranz; the ordering into fragments and testimonia is a modern editorial construction.
- On Nature — The title later doxographers attached to several early works, including Heraclitus' book and Parmenides' poem.
Scholarly notes
Fragments and testimonia · resolved
No complete work by any of these thinkers survives. What is read as Presocratic philosophy is a modern arrangement of quotations and reports preserved by later, often hostile, authors, and the division into fragments and testimonia is itself an editorial construction.