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Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 6th–5th B.C.)

Greek philosopher, founder of the Eleatic school, elegiac poet and satirist. He is known as one of the first critics of anthropomorphism and mythology. He asserted that people create gods only in their own image, and that any animal, if it believed in gods, would picture them as animals.

Treating of the concept of being from a purely materialist standpoint together with the pre-Socratics, i.e., as earth and water, and as that which they engendered, Xenophanes arrived at a high level of abstraction which made him regard being as always the same, identical with itself, uniform, and unchanging.

Although Xenophanes himself did not approach the problems of the singular and multiple, the identical and the changeable, his views facilitated the formulation of the problem of dialectical relationship between these categories. In his theory of knowledge Xenophanes attempted to prove the insufficiency of sensory data or "impressions".