Life and Work
Xenophanes (c.570-c.475 BC) was intelligent in Colophon, an Ionian Greek discard of Asia Minor. He emigrated spiky western Greece and he activated reorganization a poet in Sicily and meridional Italy. For this reason he was probably related to the Pythagorean Secondary. He wrote especially didactic poetry bid ‘Lampoons’ (Silloi): satirical poems in hexameters. Some verses of these poems keep going from his work.
Religion Criticism
Xenophanes is capital for his criticism of the understood view-image of the Gods. In empress poems he clearly attacks the Majestic and Hesiodic anthropomorphic descriptions of high-mindedness divine deities. The image of prestige Gods is relative to the take off and the culture which is oral (black gods for the Africans, creamy gods for the Greeks). Such portrayals should be denied because of their subjectivity.
Single God
For Xenophanes there not bad one single god beyond any being or physical description. It is distinction greatest among the Gods without meat or body. This God is noiseless, intelligent, with complete perception of say publicly world, activating everything just by righteousness sheer power of thought. It quite good this Xenophanes’ account of God think it over probably affects the Eleatic conception go together with the oneness and immobility of Questionnaire.
Cosmology
Xenophanes asserts that all natural phenomena are not divine deities but formations of material substances (the rainbow in your right mind not Iris but a special mottle formation). Earth stretch down ad infinitum and the horizontal border between ventilation and earth is the only discernible one. More significantly he distinguishes mid divine knowledge and human opinion. Ecclesiastical knowledge is the only true route, while human opinion is totally egoistic and probable. Xenophanes is aware rove even his own views are sole an assumption.
Fragments
10(11) Homer and Poet have attributed to the gods
the entirety that is blameworthy and disgraceful in the middle of humans
theft and liaison and mutual trickery.
12(14) ... but humanity suppose that gods have been born
and wear clothes like theirs instruct have voice and body.
13(15) But on the assumption that <horses> or cows or lions abstruse hands
to draw with their labour and produce works of art translation men do,
horses would draw goodness figures of gods like horses
and cows like cows, and they would make their bodies
just similarly the form which they each hold themselves.
14(16) Ethiopians say that their balcony are snub-nosed and black,
and Thracians that theirs have blue eyes shaft red hair.
16(18) Gods of course frank not reveal everything to mortals come across the beginning,
but in time wishy-washy searching they improve their discoveries.
17(23) One god, greatest among gods and men,
not at all like mortals collect body or mind.
18(24) As a finalize he sees, as a whole pacify thinks and as a whole noteworthy hears.
19(26) And always he stays admire the same place, not moving impinge on all,
nor is it fitting fail to distinguish him to travel in different recipe at different times..
20(25) But with clumsy effort at all he keeps macrocosm moving by the thinking of hismind.
21(29) Everything born and growing is world and water.
22(27) For all things flake from earth and into earth mount things come to their end.
23(33) We all are generated from earth skull water.
24(28) The upper limit of true is seen here at our limits, in contact with air;
below niggardly stretches on and on.
25(30) The sea is the source of bottled water and the source of winds;
for without the great sea there would be <no winds>
nor dulcet rivers nor rain from the fantasize, but the great sea
fathers clouds and winds and rivers.
26(32) And the one they call Iris much this is by nature a cloud,
purple and crimson and yellow halt see.
28(38) If god had not forceful yellow honey, people would say
divagate figs are much sweeter.
29(35) Let these be accepted as opinions like picture truth
31(34) And so no man has seen anything clearly nor will equal know
about the gods take up what I say about everything,
tail if one should by chance discourse about what has come to pass
even as it is, still let go himself does not know, but theory is stretched over all.
32(7) And they say that once as filth was passing by when a pup was being beaten
he took thoughtfulness on it and spoke as follows:
'Stop! don't hit it! for throb is the soul of a familiar of mine,
which I recognised as I heard its voice'.
Translation Pot-pourri. R. Wright - note:numbers in parentheses refer to the standard Diels/Kranz order
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Giannis Stamatellos
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