Greek philosophy, and so philosophy itself, starts with Thales and Ionian natural philosophy. When Thales choses water as the “the principle and substance of all that is” (LHP I: 175) he has abstracted the concept water from the stuff immediately encountered in puddles and so on. Subsequent attempts to specify what it is that underlies all things show influences of eastern abstraction as in Pythagoras’s numericism, which is static and “destitute of process or dialectic” (LHP I: 212) but later thinkers such as Zeno and Heraclitus grasp that which is at the heart of things in more dynamic ways. This type of dialectical thought which grasps the unity of opposites, familiar from the Phenomenology and the Logic, comes to fruition in Plato’s dialogue Parmenides (LHP I: 261). What we are witnessing here, of course, is meant to be a progression that in some sense mirrors the progression of categories in Hegel’s own Logic, but this progression of objective content gets joined to another dynamic with the appearance of Socrates. 