Editing Pre-Socratic philosophy (section)

=== Modern era ===

The pre-Socratics, along with the rest of ancient Greece,  invented the central concepts of Western civilization: freedom, democracy, individual autonomy and rationalism.{{sfn|Sandywell|1996|p=6-7}} [[Francis Bacon]], a 16th-century philosopher known for advancing the [[scientific method]], was probably the first philosopher of the modern era to use pre-Socratic axioms extensively in his texts. He criticized the pre-Socratic theory of knowledge by Xenophanes and others, claiming that their deductive reasoning could not yield meaningful results—an opinion contemporary philosophy of science rejects.{{sfn|Vamvacas|2009|pp=20-23}} Bacon's fondness for the pre-Socratics, especially Democritus' atomist theory, might have been because of his anti-Aristotelianism.{{sfn|McCarthy|1999|pp=183-187}}

[[Friedrich Nietzsche]] admired the pre-Socratics deeply, calling them "tyrants of the spirit" to mark their antithesis and his preference against Socrates and his successors.{{sfn|Laks|Most|2018|pp=21-22}} Nietzsche also weaponized pre-Socratic antiteleology, coupled with the materialism exemplified by Democritus, for his attack on Christianity and its morals. Nietzsche saw the pre-Socratics as the first ancestors of contemporary science—linking Empedocles to Darwinism and Heraclitus to physicist [[Hermann von Helmholtz|Helmholtz]].{{sfnm|1a1=Sandywell|1y=1996|1p=7|2a1=Laks|2a2=Most|2y=2018|2pp=21-22}} According to his narrative, limned in many of his books, the pre-Socratic era was the glorious era of Greece, while the so-called Golden Age that followed was an age of decay. Nietzsche incorporated the pre-Socratics in his [[Apollonian and Dionysian]] dialectics, with them representing the creative Dionysian aspect of the duo.{{sfn|Sandywell|1996|p=7}} 

[[Martin Heidegger]] found the roots of his [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|phenomenology]] and later thinking of Things and the Fourfold<ref>{{cite book |last=Mitchell |first=Andrew |date=2015 |title= The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger |location=Evanston |publisher= Northwestern University Press |isbn=9780810130760}}</ref> in the pre-Socratics,{{sfn|Curd|2008|pp=19-20}} considering Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus as the original thinkers on being, which he identified in their work as ''physis'' [φύσις] (emergence, contrasted against κρύπτεσθαι, kryptesthai, in Heraclitus' Fragment 123)<ref>{{cite book |last=Heidegger |first=Martin |date=1991 |title=The Principle of Reason |location=Bloomington |publisher= Indiana University Press |isbn=9780253210661}}</ref> or ''[[aletheia]]'' [ἀλήθεια] (truth as unconcealment).{{sfnm|1a1=Sandywell|1y=1996|1pp=69-71|2a1=Laks|2a2=Most|2y=2018|2p=73}}