PYTHAGORAS

Across a span of water from Miletus, located in the Aegean Sea,

was the small is ・ land of Samos, the birthplace of a truly
extraordinary and wise man, Pythagoras (ca. 570-497 bce).
From the various scraps of information we have about him and
his followers, an incomplete but still fascinating picture of his
new philosophical reflections emerges. Apparently dissatisfied
with conditions not only on Samos but generally in Ionia during
the tyrannical rule of the rich Polycrates, Pythagoras migrated
to southern Italy and settled there in the prosperous Greek city
of Crotone.
His active philosophical life there is usually
dated from about 525 to 500 BCE. Aristotle
tells us that the Pythagoreans "devoted
themselves to mathematics, they were the
first to advance this study; and having been
brought up in it they thought its principles
were the principles of all things.
In contrast to the Milesians, the Pythagoreans
said that things consist of numbers. Although
this account of things sounds quite strange, it
makes more sense when we consider why
Pythagoras became interested in numbers and
what his conception of numbers was.
 NUMBER, THE PRINCIPLE OF ALL
THINGS

• Pythagorean philosophy clearly shows

an interest in cosmology.
• They identified this principle with
number.
• They supposed the elements of numbers
to be the elements of all things, and the
whole heaven to be a musical scale and
a number.
• It was their study of mathematics that led them to
reduce all reality to a series of numerical relations.
• Natural phenomena followed an order which could also
be measured numerically – the duration of the year, the
seasons, the length of the day, etc.
 ELEMENTS OF NUMBER: EVEN-ODD;
LIMITED-UNLIMITED
• Everything then is reducible to number.
• This means that every number can always be
divided into even and odd elements constitute the
universal elements of number, and hence, all
things as well.
• All things had numbers, and their odd and even
values explained opposites in such things.
• This way of understanding numbers led the
Pythagoreans to formulate their most important
philosophical notion, namely the concept of
form.
• For them, form meant limit, and limit is
understandable especially in numerical terms.
The concept of limit, they believed, was best
exemplified in music and medicine.
• For in both of these arts the central fact is
harmony.
• Indeed, the Pythagoreans looked upon the
body as they would a musical instrument.
Health, they said, is achieved when the body is
“in tune” and that disease is a consequence of
undue tensions or the loss of proper tuning of
things.
• The true number, or figure, therefore, refers to
the proper balance of all the elements and
functions of the body.
• Number, then, represents the application of limit
(form) to the unlimited (matter), and the
Pythagoreans referred to music and medicine
only as vivid illustrations of their larger concept,
namely, that all things are numbers.
 MAN AND THE SOUL

• Pythagoreanism taught the immortality and

transmigration of souls. Man as well as all living beings
in general, is a composite of body and soul. The soul
existed before the body, and it was only due to some
primitive fault that souls are now jailed inside the body
as a punishment.
• His originality consists partly in his
conviction that the study of
mathematics is the best purifier of
soul.