Pythagoras biography information

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95). IX. 126–30; Nicomachus, Introduction to Arithmetic I. 2). An important part of Pythagoreanism was the relationship of all life. The second important passage is Plato’s pupil Xenocrates’ assertion that Pythagoras “discovered that the intervals in music, too, do not arise in separation from number” (Fr.

Clearer evidence is found in Dicaearchus’ complaint that it is not easy to say what Pythagoras taught his pupils because they observed no ordinary silence about it (Porphyry, VP 19).

Thus, it would appear that what is shared with animals and which led Pythagoras to suppose that they had special kinship with human beings (Dicaearchus in Porphyry, VP 19) is not intellect, as some have supposed (Sorabji 1993, 78 and 208) but rather the ability to feel emotions such as pleasure and pain.

However, several scholars have argued that the passages in which the split between the acusmatici and mathematici is described as well as the passage in which the term acusmata is used, in fact, go back to Aristotle (Burkert 1972a, 196; see Burkert 1998, 315 where he comments that the Aristotelian provenance of the text is “as obvious as it is unprovable”) and even Zhmud recognizes that a large part of the material in Iamblichus is derived from Aristotle (2012a, 170).

As a more general outline, the Pythagoreans presented the two contraries (opposites), Limited and Unlimited, as ultimate principles, or truths. There is little else about his life of which we can be confident.

The evidence suggests that Pythagoras did not write any books. 81) and of his wisdom as “fraudulent art” (Fr.

Since these two passages are unlikely to be from Aristotle, there are no references to Pythagoras as a mathematician or as a natural philosopher either in Aristotle’s extant works or in the fragments of his works. The doxographical tradition reports that Pythagoras discovered the sphericity of the earth, the five celestial zones and the identity of the evening and morning star (Diogenes Laertius VIII.

Aristotle singles out the acusma quoted above (Iamblichus, VP 31) as secret, but this statement in itself implies that others were not. Thus a powerfully aggressive zeal activated Cylon and his followers to persecute the Pythagoreans to the very last man. Eudemus is reported as beginning with Thales and an obscure figure named Mamercus, but the third person mentioned by Proclus in this report is Pythagoras, immediately before Anaxagoras.

Pythagoras was the head of the society with an inner circle of followers known as mathematikoi. Sources

2.1 Chronological Chart of Sources for Pythagoras