Poetry and Poetics in the Presocratic Philosophers

The prin‍­ciple that gods are so un‍­like hu‍­mans is in‍­com‍­pat‍­ible with a lit‍­er‍­al un‍­der‍­stand‍­ing of much earli‍­er hexa‍­met‍­er po‍­etry, and in‍­deed, much earli‍­er Greek myth in gen‍­er‍­al, with its an‍­thro‍­po‍­morph‍­ic deit‍­ies.

This strategy, I sug‍­gest, serves to il‍­lus‍­trate an epi‍­stem‍­o‍­lo‍­gic‍­al point: just as epic is un‍­veri‍­fi‍­able, so, for the most part, we can‍­not make veri‍­fi‍­able, pos‍­it‍­ive claims about our sens‍­ory ex‍­per‍­i‍­ence.

If this is cor‍­rect, then our ex‍­per‍­i‍­ence of the po‍­etry func‍­tions as a syn‍­ec‍­doche for our ex‍­per‍­i‍­ence of the world at large: we are to apply the same sort of scru‍­tiny to our ex‍­per‍­i‍­ences as we might do to the ques‍­tion‍­able tales of the earli‍­er poets.