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This chapter investigates the critique of anthropomorphism that we find in Xenophanes of Colophon and Heraclitus of Ephesus. Hesiod’s Theogony is assumed as background and as paradigm for the tendency to treat either the world’s components or gods generally as humanlike. With Xenophanes of Colophon we have the first and one of the fiercest attacks on such a kind of anthropomorphism, inasmuch as Xenophanes not only challenges anthropomorphism in traditional religion and myth but also intimates that at the root of religious beliefs and practices, among his fellow Greeks as well as among foreigners, is a motive of philautia, of self-love. Another strong early critique of anthropomorphism is found in Heraclitus of Ephesus, who curtly dismisses the idea of world-making by a god and stridently attacks certain traditional forms of religious worship. And yet neither thinker can avoid sliding into a particular kind of anthropomorphism, namely into what Mourelatos calls ‘epistemic anthropo-philautia’ – philautia understood not as the ‘self-love’ or ‘vanity’ an individual may show, but rather as the species-philautia we indulge in when we project upon the cosmos structures and forms that cognitively afford special intuitive appeal to us human beings.
The main argument in Parmenides’ didactic poem begins with these remarks by the unnamed goddess who delivers the revelation (B2 in Diels-Kranz Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker):
Come now and I shall tell you, and you listen to the account and carry it forth, which routes of inquiry (ơδοί…διζησιος , B2.2) alone are for knowing: the one (μέν, B2.3), that (…) is and that it is not possible (for …) not to be ὅπως ἔστιν τε ϰαὶ ὼς οὐϰ ἔστι μὴ είναι, B2.3) is the course of Persuasion, for it attends truth; the other ἠδ; B2.5 that (…) is not and that it is right (for …) not to be (ὡς οὐϰ ἔστιυ τε ϰαὶ ὡς χρεών ἐστι μὴ εἶναι, B2.5) that one I mark for you as being a byway from which no tidings ever come (παναπευθέα ἔμμεν άταρπόυ, B2.6) For you could neither come to know (Υυοίμς, aorist, B2.7) the thing itself which is not (τό Υε μὴ έόυ), for it cannot be consummated (οὐ Υὰρ ἀνυστόυ), nor could you point it out (φράσαις, aorist, B2.8).
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