To what extent can mortals transcend their mortal limitations?

In this essay, I will consider how four Presocratic thinkers bridge an epistemic gap between mortal and divine, thus transcending their mortal limitations. Fundamentally, human knowledge is limited: from Homeric and Hesiodic tradition, to Xenophanes and Alcmeon,[1]to Guthrie evaluating that “men could have no certain knowledge, that was reserved for god”,[2]the argument attested to throughout tends to a distinction between mortal ignorance or lack of knowledge and divine omniscience.[3]Within this, Tor refers us specifically to the dominating relationship between ‘divine epistemic superiority’ and ‘mortal epistemic limitations’.[4]Mortal shortcomings in knowledge are defined against the omniscience and clarity of divine knowledge, whom we might consider in Xenophanic terms to have insight through sense-perception of ‘the whole’ (B25).[5]The respective responses of the four thinkers whom I have examined to support the thesis of this essay in order are Theognis of Megara, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles. 
[1]See Barnes (1982), 137; Alcmeon B1. Alcmaeon, following on in Xenophanes’ skeptical tradition, begins his treatise Concerning Nature highlighting that ‘concerning things unseen the gods possess clear understanding (saphênia) but so far as men may guess…’ (B1).[2]Guthrie (1967), 398. [3]Barnes (1982), 139. [4]Tor (2017), 115.[5]Brunschwig and Lloyd (2002), 76. On the relationship between and etymology of knowing and seeing.