Greek seafaring between the 10th and 6th centuries BCE gave rise to a technical culture centered around navigation, commerce, and international cultural exchange. The Greeks were not a unified nation in the modern sense, confined to a territory centralized in Attica or the Peloponnese. Instead, they were a collection of independent city-states (poleis) spread across the Mediterranean, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Black Sea. The intense commercial relationships among these Greek settlements and with other peoples wove a Mediterranean cultural (...) web that fostered a genuine spirit of intercultural exchange, leading to a new cultural synthesis that gave the Greeks – and the world to this day – an extraordinary drive for originality. This technical culture, which Rossetti calls the “cultura dell’attendibilità,” was based on observation, objectivity, and rationality. Without these principles, and relying solely on myth, seafaring could never have flourished. This shift away from myths to a new culture is testified by Xenophanes, who, in DK B 18 (LM D53), contrasts the ancient method of gaining knowledge through communication with the gods with a new method of research that in time yields better results. (shrink)

In this paper, I will first try to refute Lesher’s hypothesis who reads in 18.1 a polemical reference to divination: in the first verse, in fact, Xenophanes merely outlines an exemplum fictum, punctually overturned in 18.2. The fragment must be read, on the contrary, against the historical background that produced it. The language of Xenophanes in B18 is the same as ever and many are the interconnections with the remaining evidences. Here it is enough to recall the link with the (...) two surviving elegies, in which the value of intellectuals is proudly claimed, as opposed to that of the athletes hailed by the masses. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that in B18 the researchers (ζητοῦντες) are celebrated, with a genuine ‘monument’ to what was being discovered at Miletus. I will also try to show how previous interpretations have been vitiated by an unfair devaluation of Xenophanes’ ‘scientific’ activity, seen as a pre-Herodotean ἱστορίη, not as an investigation referring to a methodology that was taking shape and in which Xenophanes largely recognised himself. B18, therefore, is not the first affirmation of coherent ‘philosophical’ interpretation, but the first, brilliant intuition of what enquiry was revealing, in opposition to the mythical tradition, in a passage from μῦθος to λόγος that was gradual, rich in nuances, but irreversible. (shrink)

An examination of Xenophanes’ fragment DK 21 B 34 shows how it to some extent anticipates what is known in contemporary epistemological debate as the “Gettier problem.” According to the argument underlying this problem, it is not enough to have a “justified true belief” in order to be able to say that one has “knowledge.” As Xenophanes’ text has it, even if one were able to say something true, one would not know it yet. This is because, according to Xenophanes, (...) no one is capable of grasping the evident truth of things, since only conjectures about everything are available. But while conjectures cannot rise above the level of pure opinion, they are not all equal: as DK 21 B 18 recognizes, they are perfectible. But what is the basis of this position, which oscillates between scepticism and fallibilism? Since perfectibility never reaches the end (namely the truth), this progress is infinite: the basis of Xenophanes’ epistemology may therefore be his physics of the infinite, which, however, is itself only a conjecture. This entails the risk of self-refutation. To avoid this peril, the doctrine of Parmenides will have to batten down the hatches. (shrink)

L'article vise à déterminer si le nóos dans sa valeur volitionnelle a été attribué par Xénophane non seulement au theós, mais aussi aux humains. Dans ce but, l'étude commence avec l'examen du fr. 25, où un nóos volitionnel est clairement reconnu comme une caractéristique de la nature divine : le fragment suggère que la spécificité du theós tient dans sa capacité à provoquer des effets sur toute chose, et cela, sans effort. L'analyse se tourne alors vers l’examen des fragments de (...) Xénophane sur le thème du savoir et sur la description des dieux, afin de démontrer que des capacités noétiques, en général, et du nóos volitionnel en particulier, sont attribuables aux humains : elle s'appuie sur le contraste entre la nature absolue du divin et celle purement comparative de la dimension humaine, La relation étroite qui, selon Xénophane, lie la sophíe à la areté et à ses implications pratiques est aussi une clé pour comprendre quels pourraient être les effets réels du nóos volitionnel de l’homme. (shrink)