Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T11:05:46.969Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 2 - Philolaus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2014

Daniel W. Graham
Affiliation:
Brigham Young University
Carl A. Huffman
Affiliation:
DePauw University, Indiana
Get access

Summary

Introduction

Philolaus of Croton was the first Pythagorean to write a book and so he should be of central importance for an understanding of the movement. Yet there have been persistent questions about the genuineness of his fragments, and so he has occupied an anomalous position in many accounts. In the later twentieth century, studies have sorted out the genuine from the spurious in Philolaus, and with those studies has come a new understanding of the philosopher. He has emerged as a major thinker in his own right. Increasingly he has come to be appreciated, not just as a Pythagorean, but also as an independent philosopher who interacts with the ontology, epistemology, cosmology and astronomy of his time. In this chapter we will examine Philolaus the philosopher in an attempt to understand his contributions to fifth-century thought.

Scholarly judgments

The dominant view of Philolaus in connection with Pythagoras in the mid-twentieth century can be found in J. E. Raven's treatment of the two thinkers in G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven's influential textbook The Presocratic Philosophers (1957). On Raven's view, Pythagoras or his early followers developed two major “scientific doctrines,” “first, the ultimate dualism between Limit and Unlimited, and second, the equation of things with numbers” (229). Pythagoras himself is likely to have discovered the simple numerical ratios of musical intervals, using the length of strings on a monochord (a simple stringed instrument). He may have invented the Pythagorean theorem, recognized the incommensurability of the diagonal with the sides of a square, and enunciated the harmony of the spheres doctrine. Meanwhile, the surviving fragments of Philolaus, who allegedly philosophized in the late fifth century, were highly suspect. There were, to be sure, close parallels between Aristotle's reports of “the so-called Pythagoreans” and the Philolaus fragments, but these latter looked suspiciously like ex post facto imitations of Aristotle, and they contained epistemological speculations that seemed anachronistic; besides, Aristotle only mentioned Philolaus once, and then on a topic of moral psychology (309–11). Accordingly, “the fragments attributed to Philolaus can be dismissed, with regret but little hesitation, as part of a post-Aristotelian forgery” (311).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Philolaus
  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book: A History of Pythagoreanism
  • Online publication: 05 May 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139028172.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Philolaus
  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book: A History of Pythagoreanism
  • Online publication: 05 May 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139028172.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Philolaus
  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book: A History of Pythagoreanism
  • Online publication: 05 May 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139028172.003
Available formats
×