Juan David Avila Arias

The educative role of Homeric poetry has been widely recognized in the course of History. Its contents' value is taken by some experts as an Ancient Greece Encyclopedia, meanwhile, its composition manner has been qualified as a "piece of art" category. Nonetheless, both of them are not wide enough overviews of the Greek poet. The present text attempts to answer a fundamental question, trying not to reduce itself to one of the possibilities mentioned before, i.e. what makes Homer a poet who has been read until nowadays, being qualified as one of the major authors of our culture? According to that, I shall apply to the main critic of Homeric works, namely, Plato, who shows the main problems of his contemporaneous epical poetry in The Republic' comments on that issue. Meanwhile, Plato points out epical poetry's fundamental sources as he reveals its primary ontological feature: poetic experience. The latter composes this essay's key concept.

Philosophy has traditionally been taken as a condition for a good life. Philosophy has been understood as knowledge of truth since Greek though and it's been insolvably linked to a good existence. Thus, knowledge of truth has been incorporated as a condition of human life appearing as a natural tendency of man. However, another kind of knowledge, which restructures existence conditions by rebuilding their apparently natural relation to truth, may exist. Such thought is built inside of Nietzsche's philosophy; a thought of laugh that dissolves the natural connection between knowledge and truth and, by the same time, builds new conditions of existence which aims at life's affirmation. The present text attempts to show why the incorporation of truth is a problem for Nietzsche and how useful is to life settling this problem.