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Poetry and Poetics in the Presocratic Philosophers
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- Quotes52
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- Jan Nohas quoted3 years ago
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. - Jan Nohas quoted3 years agoThis 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.
- Jan Nohas quoted3 years agoIf 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.
- Jan Nohas quoted3 years agoIn this respect, the familiar world we inhabit occupies the same epistemic status as the world of the remote, epic past of which Homer and Hesiod spoke: it is equally uncertain and open to contestation.
- Jan Nohas quoted3 years agoXenophanes, here, exploits his audience
’
s familiarity with this capacity of earlier poetry to illustrate the epistemological status of the world we inhabit: just as we cannot trust the engrossing tales of earlier poets, so we cannot trust any account of the natural world, even an account concerning mundane, familiar matters. - Jan Nohas quoted3 years agoThe stylised world of hexameter becomes the world of our immediate sensory experience.
- Jan Nohas quoted3 years agoXenophanes
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relationship with earlier poetry can be regarded as more complex than a straightforward denial of their veracity. - Jan Nohas quoted3 years agoFor Xenophanes, however, there is no such stark distinction between the topics for which one could rely on the Muses and those in our immediate expertise: we lack knowledge even over how sweet a particular food is.
- Jan Nohas quoted3 years agoThe speaker would have no means of knowing whether the
‘
arrows
’
of his speech have
‘
hit the mark - Jan Nohas quoted3 years agoone cannot even have knowledge of such a mundane detail as the sweetness of figs.
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