The nature of ‘change’

‘Change’ has been a philosophical issue at least since the Pre-Socratics. Heraclitus, Plato tells us (Cratylus 402a), said that everything is in flux and nothing stays still, and that reality is like a river: you can't step into the same one twice. On the other hand, according to Parmenides, the world is uncreated and imperishable, the universe endless and static (Diels Fragment 8, Kirk & Raven 1957: 273). Parmenides does admit that the senses perceive change, but this is epiphenomenal, a matter of the names given to (misleading) appearances. Somewhat later Empedocles derived the appearance of change from a vision of eternal cycles, and that of stability from the fact that the cycles always return to their starting-point, and everything repeats itself. (See §6.3 on linear vs. cyclic views of time, and their relation to the interpretation of linguistic change.)

Change is clearly a major puzzlement and source of distress: the early Greek solution was either to recognize it and posit a universe in flux, or reduce it to the status of an illusion (as the ancient Hindus did with their concept of māya).