Volume 1, Issue 2

Abstract: 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. 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. 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. The result is not so much polemic as rather selection and accommodation. 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. 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.

Abstract: Do you need to know the name of the god you’re praying to? If you get the name wrong what happens to the prayer? What if the god has more than one name? Who gets to decide whether the name works (you or the god or neither)? What are names anyway? Are the names of the gods any different in how they work from any other names? Is there a way of fixing the reference without using the name so as to avoid the problems of optional names? There is a type of formula used in prayer in ancient Greece which I call (in this paper) a “precautionary formula”. The person praying uses expressions like “whether you want to be called [x] or [y]”, and “if this is the name by which you would like to be called”. I also include here the practice of adding definite descriptions that identify the god by means other than the name (e.g. their place of birth or residence, their deeds etc). In this paper I ask what these formulae were for, why so many occur in philosophical work, particularly Plato, and whether the puzzles about the names of the gods go back to the Presocratics.

Abstract: There are two extreme interpretations of Presocratic, and in particular Ionian, theories of religion. In one case, the Ionians are viewed as the initiators of a tradition of rational theology leading up to Augustine and early Christian thinkers. Natural theology as practiced by the early philosophers provides a basic understanding of the divine independent of revealed truths. In the other case, the Ionians are viewed as subversives who undermined the basis of civic religion by replacing the gods in every important role they played in the cosmos. On this view, they were positivists who aimed at replacing religion with science. I argue for a middle ground between these two extremes. For the Ionians, an understanding of the gods was fundamentally different from that of later theistic theologians, precisely because the former saw the divine not as autonomous and sovereign, but as a subordinate feature of nature. The Ionians did not recognize a supernatural realm, but only divine attributes that were exemplified within the domain of nature. On the other hand, the Ionians (with the possible exception of the atomists) did not aim at banishing divine properties from the world, but rather at associating them with the rational and orderly power governing the world. Their interest was not in rejecting divinity, but in rejecting a conception of the divine as arbitrary and willful. What they invented was not natural theology, but a theology of nature.

Abstract: There are three components in early Greek philosophy that, while not explicitly stated by the Presocratics, taken together provide the support for their confidence about human knowledge. First, there is an analysis of the concept of divinity, originally found in Xenophanes, but picked up by later thinkers, which removes genuine divinity from the traditional gods and places it in the cosmos itself. The second theme, a continuation of the first, is that human beings, having capacities for perception, thought, and understanding, are able to come to know things beyond their limited daily experience. The third is the growing elaboration of the concepts of understanding and knowledge, along with a developing account of intellect and/or soul according to which thinking is an aspect of soul by which human intellect can ‘latch on to’ the structure of nature. The paper is primarily concerned with these notions in Xenophanes and Heraclitus.

Abstract: In the first instance, this paper offers a new interpretation of the logic of Xenophanes B18.1. 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. Rather, Xenophanes rejects traditional conceptions of divine disclosure as theologically faulty and supplants them with his own, alternative notion of disclosure. Having argued that Xenophanes developed a conception of divine disclosure, I advance further suggestions concerning its function and characteristics. 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. But Lesher, I suggest, tells only half the story. On Xenophanes’ conception of disclosure, the divine purposively facilitates mortal belief-formation and mortal inquiry. That is, Xenophanes’ own understanding of disclosure underlies his positive views regarding what does lie within the scope of mortal epistemology. More speculatively, I develop two alternative interpretations of the precise notion of purposiveness which underlies Xenophanean disclosure. 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. Another, somewhat less likely possibility is that Xenophanes maintains less idiosyncratically that the divine guides particular mortals in particular circumstances. Finally, I ask how the proposed interpretation of Xenophanes’ epistemology may lend nuance to our understanding of the complexity of his critical engagement with the traditional mantic model of divine disclosure.

Abstract: The focus of this essay is on Xenophanes’ criticism of anthropomorphic representation of the gods, famously sounding like a declaration of war against a constituent part of the Greek religion, and adopting terms and a tone that are unequalled amongst “pre-Socratic” authors for their directness and explicitness. While the main features of Xenophanes’ polemic are well known thanks to some of the most studied fragments of the pre-Socratic tradition, a different line of enquiry from the usual one is attempted by considering the multi-layered background of the religious beliefs revolving around the idea that the gods have human form as outlined in the tradition of epic poetry or represented in cult statues: in the light of this consideration Xenophanes’ text can take on some new characteristics. In the second part of the article, emphasis is put on the importance of the correlation Xenophanes established between the issue of the appearance of the gods and that of the certainty of knowledge , in terms that have exerted tremendous influence on later thought, most notably on Plato in the Timaeus .

Abstract: The speaker who self-identifies as a god after the painter analogy in Empedocles’ On nature cannot be Empedocles himself, since other fragments make it clear that he does not regard himself as a god. This paper accordingly advances and explores the hypothesis that the speaker here is the Muse Kalliopeia, who is elsewhere invoked by Empedocles and identified for Pausanias as the source of his more than mortal understanding. This hypothesis is seen to resolve several tensions and difficulties in the fragments, particularly with respect to the otherwise contradictory attitude toward humans’ cognitive potential. It also brings into focus a number of connections between Empedocles’ On nature and its generic models in Parmenides and the Hesiodic Theogony . Recognizing that the majority of On nature ’s main didactic content likely took the form of a report by Empedocles of a revelation he once received from Kalliopeia also brings into focus the identity and function of what he describes for Pausanias as her assurances. These are the appeals to things belonging to the domain of everyday experience in which her human auditor can discern the operation of the same principles operative in the larger cosmos that are only accessible by revelation. The appeal to the familiar operation of Love in his own body to engender confidence in her claim regarding Love’s operation as a principle of unification and harmony throughout the cosmos is the most important example.

Abstract: The doxographical tradition is a body of doctrine with pronounced ‘secular’ features. I shall look at individual Aëtian chapters where the secularization is comparable with that in Aristotle (or Theophrastus), or has gone even further. The chapters chosen for this exercise can be linked with passages in Aristotle dealing with the same themes. What happened is that the ancient poets, or theologoi, listed in several of Aristotle’s dialectical overviews have almost entirely been eliminated. Apart from a few isolated passages Aëtius confines discussion of the divine to his chapters on principles and theology. I shall also look briefly at the abstracts in Damascius from Eudemus’ discussion of early theologies, both Greek and Oriental, and compare them with a passage in Aristotle and a chapter of the Placita.