Concept

Fire

Overview

Fire is the rapid oxidation of a fuel in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products.

Flames, the most visible portion of the fire, are produced in the combustion reaction when the fuel reaches its ignition point temperature. Flames from hydrocarbon fuels consist primarily of carbon dioxide, water vapor, oxygen, and nitrogen. If hot enough, the gases may become ionized to produce plasma. The color and intensity of the flame depend on the type of fuel and composition of the surrounding gases.

Fire, in its most common form, has the potential to result in conflagration, which can lead to permanent physical damage. Fire directly affects land-based ecological systems worldwide. The benefits of fire include stimulating plant growth and maintaining ecological balance. Its harms include hazards to life and property, atmospheric pollution, and water contamination. When fire removes protective vegetation, heavy rainfall can cause soil erosion. The burning of vegetation releases nitrogen into the atmosphere, unlike other plant nutrients such as potassium and phosphorus, which remain in the ash and are quickly recycled into the soil. This loss of nitrogen produces a long-term reduction in the fertility of the soil. However, it can be recovered by nitrogen-fixing plants—some of them of agricultural value, such as clover, peas, and beans, by decomposition of animal waste and corpses, and by natural phenomena such as lightning.

Fire is one of the four classical elements and has been used throughout human history for purposes that now include cooking, generating heat and light, clearing land for agriculture, signaling, propulsion, smelting, forging, incineration of waste, cremation, rituals, weapons, and destruction, including in warfare.

Various technologies and strategies have been devised to prevent, manage, mitigate, and extinguish fires, with professional firefighters playing a leading role. For example, most home fires start from unattended cooking, although cigarettes are another major cause. Smoke detectors and sprinkler systems greatly reduce harm from home fires.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Fire is discussed.

But when fire gets in and dissolves the particles and destroys the uniformity, it has greater mobility, and becoming fluid is thrust forth by the neighbouring air and spreads upon the earth; and this dissolution of the solid masses is called melting, and their spreading out upon the earth flowing. Again, when the fire goes out of the fusile substance, it does not pass into a vacuum, but into the neighbouring air…
Plato, Timaeus
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
A like instance of alliance is that of reviving butterflies, benumbed and nearly dead from cold, by the gentle warmth of fire; so that fire is no less able to revive animals than to ripen vegetables. We may also mention the celebrated invention of Fracastorius, of applying a pan considerably heated to the head in desperate cases of apoplexy, which clearly expands the animal spirits, when compressed and almost…
Francis Bacon, Novum organum
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
The pure vapours are the transitional stage in the passing of sea into fire, the impure the transitional stage in the passing of earth into water. Thus the two paths of metamorphosis of the fire run continuously side by side, upwards and downwards, to and fro, from fire to water, from water to earth, from earth back again to water, from water to fire. Whereas Heraclitus is a follower of Anaximander in the most…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays Collected Works, Volume Two
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
As for water, again, its strong cohesiveness of parts, [when frozen], can be overcome only by fire, whereas, when the cohesion is less strong, it can be equally decomposed by fire and air, the latter entering its interstices and the former separating even its constituent triangles. Nothing, however, can dissolve air strongly condensed, without attacking its composing elements; though when it coheres less strongly…
Plato, The works of Plato
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
In this way they are made proof against future attacks. Such fire-magic reaches down even into later civilizations. A survival of this sort is the St. John's fire still prevalent in many regions of Europe and, in view of its origin, still frequently called 'solstice fire' in southern Germany. On these occasions also, the young men and maidens leap over the fire and expose themselves to the danger of its flames, in…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Philosophers who discussed Fire

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Incorporeality

Place in the tradition

Part of Hellenistic philosophy.

Explore Fire in the interactive graph →