Stoics incorporated features from Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, such as nous and fire respectively. The Epicureans saw Democritus' atomism as their predecessor while the Sceptics were linked to Xenophanes. 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. 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. Bacon's fondness for the pre-Socratics, especially Democritus' atomist theory, might have been because of his anti-Aristotelianism. 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. 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 Helmholtz. 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, according to Nietzsche. Nietzsche incorporated the pre-Socratics in his Apollonian and Dionysian dialectics, with them representing the creative Dionysian aspect of the duo. Martin Heidegger found the roots of his phenomenology and later thinking of Things and the Fourfold in the pre-Socratics, 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) or aletheia [αλήθεια] (truth as unconcealment). References Cited sources Further reading Cornford, F. M. 1991. From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Graham, D. W. 2010. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Furley, D. J., and R. E. Allen, eds. 1970. Studies in Presocratic Philosophy. Vol. 1, The Beginnings of Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jaeger, W. 1947. The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Lloyd, G. E. R., Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle. New York: Norton, 1970. Luchte,