30 Facts About Xenophanes

1.

Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic of Homer from Ionia who travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world in early Classical Antiquity.

2.

Xenophanes composed elegiac couplets that criticised his society's traditional values of wealth, excesses, and athletic victories.

3.

Xenophanes criticised Homer and the other poets in his works for representing the gods as foolish or morally weak.

4.

Xenophanes's poems have not survived intact; only fragments of some of his work survives in quotations by later philosophers and literary critics.

5.

Xenophanes is seen as one of the most important pre-Socratic philosophers.

6.

Xenophanes distinguished between different forms of knowledge and belief, an early instance of epistemology.

7.

The Ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius reports that Xenophanes was born in Colophon, a city that once existed in Ionia, in present day Turkey.

8.

Xenophanes's surviving work refers to Thales, Epimenides, and Pythagoras, and he himself is mentioned in the writings of Heraclitus and Epicharmus.

9.

Knowledge of Xenophanes' views comes from fragments of his poetry that survive as quotations by later Greek writers.

10.

Unlike other pre-socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus or Parmenides, who only wrote one work, Xenophanes wrote a variety of poems, and no two of the fragments can positively be identified as belonging to the same text.

11.

Xenophanes' surviving writings display a skepticism that became more commonly expressed during the fourth century BC.

12.

Xenophanes aimed his critique at the polytheistic religious views of earlier Greek poets and of his own contemporaries.

13.

We must remember that such titles are of later date, and Xenophanes had been given a place among philosophers long before the time of rates.

14.

Xenophanes sought to reform the understanding of divine nature by casting doubt on Greek mythology as relayed by Hesiod and Homer, in order to make it more consistent with notions of piety from Ancient Greek religion.

15.

Xenophanes composed natural explanations for phenomena such as the formation of clouds and rainbows rather than myths, satirizing traditional religious views of his time as human projections.

16.

Xenophanes wrote a number of elegiac poems on proper conduct at a symposium, the Ancient Greek drinking parties that were held in commemorate athletic or poetic victories, or to welcome young men into aristocratic society.

17.

Xenophanes rejected the value of athletic victories, stating that cultivating wisdom was more important.

18.

Xenophanes has a free will and is the Highest Good, he embodies the beauty of the moral perfection and of the absence of sin.

19.

Xenophanes was likely the first philosopher to come up with an explanation for the manifestation of St Elmo's fire that appears on the masts of ships when they pass through clouds during a thunderstorm.

20.

Xenophanes believed that the earth extended infinitely far down, as well as infinitely far in every direction.

21.

Xenophanes concluded from his examination of fossils of sea creatures that were found above land that water once must have covered all of the Earth's surface.

22.

Xenophanes used this evidence to conclude that the arche or cosmic principle of the universe was a tide flowing in and out between wet and dry, or earth and water.

23.

The idea of alternating states and human life perishing and coming back suggests he believed in the principle of causation, another distinguishing step that Xenophanes takes away from Ancient philosophical traditions to ones based more on scientific observation.

24.

Xenophanes is one of the first philosophers to show interest in epistemological questions as well as metaphysical ones.

25.

Xenophanes held that there actually exists an objective truth in reality, but that as mere mortals, humans are unable to know it.

26.

Xenophanes is credited with being one of the first philosophers to distinguish between true belief and knowledge, as well as acknowledge the prospect that one can think he knows something but not really know it.

27.

Xenophanes is sometimes considered the first skeptic in Western philosophy.

28.

Xenophanes's alleged skepticism can be seen as a precursor to Pyrrhonism.

29.

Sextus quotes Pyrrho's follower Timon as praising Xenophanes and dedicating his satires to him, and giving him as an example of somebody who is not a perfect skeptic, but who is forgivably close to it.

30.

Eusebius quoting Aristocles of Messene says that Xenophanes was the founder of a line of philosophy that culminated in Pyrrhonism.