Osborne avoids the common presentation of the presocratics as essentially cosmologists responding to one another in a linear sequence, and particularly questions whether Parmenides was responding to Heraclitus or vice versa.

The book opens with a motivating discussion of a papyrus newly assembled in 1992 containing fragments of Empedocles which brings into question the division between his mystical and cosmological writings (by plausibly indicating they were contained in a single work).

The takeaway is that we should recognize the Presocratics as thinkers with a wide variety of interests, just as we would expect of later philosophers.