Catherine Rowett - Pythagoras Quotes

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Plato's metaphysics grew out of that of Parmenides, together with a strong feel for Heraclitus's account of the physical world as a world of incessant change. His ethics were deeply inspired by Socrates, but his views on the soul also pick up on motifs that emerge in Pythagoras.

Catherine Rowett
Philosophers tend to recast the dominant religious doctrines to form a rational deductive system defensible from within the philosophical schools. But Pythagoras's spiritual adventures seem markedly different.

Catherine Rowett
Unlike Pythagoras, Empedocles wrote his thoughts down. He was famous in antiquity for his fine poetic style as well as his ideas about the world. Both his style and his ideas come across in the surviving patches of text, and both can be appreciated even in translation.

Catherine Rowett
Whether or not Pythagoras discovered his own theorem, it is certainly true that Pythagoras and his followers acquired a reputation for mathematical and geometrical investigations. They conducted their mathematics in a spatial way that strikes us as strange: numbers were conceived as lines, squares, triangles, and oblongs, laid out as patterns of counters or pebbles.

Catherine Rowett
The Pythagoreans were not the first to think of suggesting a pattern of numbers as key to the distances between the heavenly bodies (Anaximander had already made that breakthrough, a little ahead of Pythagoras). But in the Pythagorean speculations we can see that the notion of harmony, and the power of simple ratios in the tetraktys, has encouraged them to suggest that perfect patterns are what we would expect.

Catherine Rowett