Another, somewhat less likely possibility is that Xenophanes maintains less idiosyncratically that the divine guides particular mortals in particular circumstances. Most probably, Xenophanes reconceptualises the notion of divine disclosure radically as the view that the divine purposively facilitates all mortal experience and belief-formation as part of its intelligent direction of the cosmos and its inhabitants. More speculatively, I develop two alternative interpretations of the precise notion of purposiveness which underlies Xenophanean disclosure. That is, Xenophanes’ own understanding of disclosure underlies his positive views regarding what does lie within the scope of mortal epistemology. On Xenophanes’ conception of disclosure, the divine purposively facilitates mortal belief-formation and mortal inquiry. But Lesher, I suggest, tells only half the story. I follow and develop Lesher’s (1983) argument that Xenophanes arrives at his understanding of the limitations of human knowledge by rejecting traditional divinatory assumptions. Having argued that Xenophanes developed a conception of divine disclosure, I advance further suggestions concerning its function and characteristics. Rather, Xenophanes rejects traditional conceptions of divine disclosure as theologically faulty and supplants them with his own, alternative notion of disclosure. Contrary to the two ways in which previous commentators have construed this line, Xenophanes neither categorically rejects the notion of divine disclosure nor acquiesces in traditional understandings of it. In the first instance, this paper offers a new interpretation of the logic of Xenophanes B18.1. Instead, he seems in general to be applying his philosophical reason to the phenomenon of Greek religion with a fundamentally conservative intent, rejecting what he must, saving what he can by reinterpreting it. Unlike most of his Presocratic colleagues, Heraclitus does not discard wholesale the traditional apparatus of Greek gods and replace it with his own philosophical henotheism. The result is not so much polemic as rather selection and accommodation. The gods that interest Heraclitus are not those of the poets but those of the city and the mysteries, and it is these that he tries to set into relation with his philosophical views. I outline four images of Heraclitus that have shaped understandings of his views on religion in the past, and then provide an interpretation of the relevant texts, especially B5, B14, B15, B32, B93, and B51 D-K. Professor Kirk's method is critical and objective, and his 1954 work marks a significant advance in the study of Presocratic thought.The question of what exactly Heraclitus’ views on religion were is one of the most difficult and controversial of all the problems that make his philosophy so perplexing, and so fascinating. Ancient accounts of Heraclitus were inadequate and misleading, and as Kirk wrote, understanding was often hindered by excessive dogmatism and a selective use of the fragments. To each he gives a selective apparatus, a literal translation and and an extended commentary in which problems of textual and philosophical criticism are discussed. In securing his text, Professor Kirk has taken into account all the ancient testimonies, and in his critical work he attached particular importance to the context in which each fragment is set. Professor Kirk discusses fully the fragments which he finds genuine and treats in passing others that were generally accepted as genuine but here considered paraphrased or spurious. This work provides a text and an extended study of those fragments of Heraclitus' philosophical utterances whose subject is the world as a whole rather than man and his part in it.
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