Patricia Curd

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.