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Plato and Pythagoreanism

Online ISBN:
9780199345519
Print ISBN:
9780199898220
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Plato and Pythagoreanism

Phillip Sidney Horky
Phillip Sidney Horky

Lecturer in Classics

Durham University
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Published online:
26 September 2013
Published in print:
20 August 2013
Online ISBN:
9780199345519
Print ISBN:
9780199898220
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Was Plato a Pythagorean? Plato's students and earliest critics thought so, but scholars since the nineteenth century have been more skeptical. This book argues that a specific type of Pythagorean philosophy, called “mathematical” Pythagoreanism, exercised a decisive influence on fundamental aspects of Plato's philosophy. The progenitor of mathematical Pythagoreanism was the infamous Pythagorean heretic and political revolutionary Hippasus of Metapontum, a student of Pythagoras who is credited with experiments in harmonics that led to innovations in mathematics. The innovations of Hippasus and other mathematical Pythagoreans, including Empedocles of Agrigentum, Epicharmus of Syracuse, Philolaus of Croton, and Archytas of Tarentum, presented philosophers like Plato with novel ways to reconcile empirical knowledge with abstract mathematical theories. This book demonstrates how mathematical Pythagoreanism established many of the fundamental philosophical questions Plato dealt with in his central dialogues, including Cratylus, Phaedo, Republic, Timaeus, and Philebus. In the process, it also illuminates the historical significance of the mathematical Pythagoreans, a group whose influence on the development of philosophical and scientific methods has been obscured since late antiquity. The picture that results is one in which Plato inherits mathematical Pythagorean method only to transform it into a powerful philosophical argument about the essential relationships between the cosmos and the human being.

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