ग्रीक दार्शनिक (560-478 ईसा पूर्व)

xenophanes's Usage Examples:

Theophrastus (in Simplicius's Ad Physica, 5) sums up Xenophanes's teaching in the propositions, "The All is One and the One is God."

Aristotle, in a passage already cited, Metaphysics, A5, speaks of Xenophanes as the first of the Eleatic unitarians, adding that his monotheism was reached through the contemplation of the oupavos.

"The Eleatic school," says the Stranger in Plato's Sophist, 242 D, "beginning with Xenophanes, and even earlier, starts from the principle of the unity of all things."

Of Xenophanes's utterances about (1) God, (2) the world, (3) knowledge, the following survive: (1) "There is one God, greatest among gods and men, neither in shape nor in thought like unto mortals..

The silence of the extant fragments, which have not one word about the unity of Being, favours the one view; the voice of antiquity, which proclaims Xenophanes the founder of Eleaticism, has been thought to favour the other.

Whether Xenophanes was a monotheist, whose assertion of the unity of God suggested to Parmenides the doctrine of the unity of Being, or a pantheist, whose assertion of the unity of God was also a declaration of the unity of Being, so that he anticipated Parmenides - in other words, whether Xenophanes's teaching was purely theological or had also a philosophical significance - is a question about which authorities have differed and will probably continue to differ.

XENOPHANES of Colophon, the reputed founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, is supposed to have been born in the third or fourth decade of the 6th century B.C. An exile from his Ionian home, he resided for a time in Sicily, at Zancle and at Catana, and afterwards established himself in southern Italy, at Elea, a Phocaean colony founded in the sixty-first Olympiad (536-533).

See further the articles on Xenophanes; Parmenides; Zeno (of Elea); Melissus, with the works there quoted; also the histories of philosophy by Zeller, Gomperz, Windelband, 'c.

Xenophanes in the middle of the 6th century had made the first great attack on the crude mythology of early Greece, including in his onslaught the whole anthropomorphic system enshrined in the poems of Homer and Hesiod.

Its foundation is often attributed to Xenophanes of Colophon, but, although there is much in his speculations which formed part of the later Eleatic doctrine, it is probably more correct to regard Parmenides as the founder of the school.

xenophanes's Meaning':

Greek philosopher (560-478 BC