The expression “Panta rei” (πάντα ῥεῖ), translated into Italian as “everything flows” and well-known in its ancient Greek formulation, is considered one of the most influential maxims in the history of Western philosophy. Attributed to the philosopher Heraclitus, who lived between the 6th and 5th centuries BC in Ephesus, an Ionic city in the Anatolian peninsula (part of modern-day Turkey), “everything flows” is also one of the most entrenched and abused linguistic clichés that can be explicitly traced back to the tradition of philosophical thought. The meaning is generally derived from one of the best-known and most frequently quoted fragments of Heraclitus that have survived to us – “You cannot step into the same river twice” – of which “Panta rei” would represent the synthesis, despite having a different origin.
The frequency with which this expression has been and is used in both everyday conversations and in more formal, sometimes grandiloquent and pompous speeches, generally to indicate the mutability of things by emphasizing that nothing is permanent, has, however, contributed to consolidating a meaning that is rather partial and, in some ways, opposite to that which philosophical studies tend to attribute to it.
Read the article on Il Post.
Follow
consiglia