Xenophanes

Xenophanes
Fictionalized portrait of Xenophanes from a 17th-century engraving
Born	c. 570 BC Colophon, Ionian League (modern-day Değirmendere, İzmir, Turkey)
Died	c. 478 BC (aged c. 92) Syracuse, Sicily (modern-day Italy)
Era	Pre-Socratic philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
Main interests	Social criticism Kataphasis Natural philosophy Epistemology
Notable ideas	Religious polytheistic views as human projections Earth and water is the arche The distinction between knowledge and mere true belief.

Xenophanes of Colophon (/zəˈnɒfəniːz/ zə-NOF-ə-neez;^[1][2] Ancient Greek: Ξενοφάνης ὁ Κολοφώνιος [ksenopʰánɛːs ho kolopʰɔ̌ːnios]; c. 570 – c. 478 BC) was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic of Homer from Ionia who travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world in early Classical Antiquity.

As a poet, Xenophanes was known for his critical style, writing poems that are considered among the first satires. He composed elegiac couplets that criticised his society's traditional values of wealth, excesses, and athletic victories. He criticised Homer and the other poets in his works for representing the gods as foolish or morally weak. His poems have not survived intact; only fragments of some of his work survive in quotations by later philosophers and literary critics.

Xenophanes is seen as one of the most important pre-Socratic philosophers. A highly original thinker, Xenophanes sought explanations for physical phenomena such as clouds or rainbows without references to divine or mythological explanations, but instead based on first principles. He distinguished between different forms of knowledge and belief, an early instance of epistemology. Later philosophers such as the Eleatics and the Pyrrhonists saw Xenophanes as the founder of their doctrines, and interpreted his work in terms of those doctrines, although modern scholarship disputes these claims.