A History of Pythagoreanism PDF Download

Author: Carl A. Huffman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139915983
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 659

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive, authoritative and innovative account of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, one of the most enigmatic and influential philosophies in the West. In twenty-one chapters covering a timespan from the sixth century BC to the seventeenth century AD, leading scholars construct a number of different images of Pythagoras and his community, assessing current scholarship and offering new answers to central problems. Chapters are devoted to the early Pythagoreans, and the full breadth of Pythagorean thought is explored including politics, religion, music theory, science, mathematics and magic. Separate chapters consider Pythagoreanism in Plato, Aristotle, the Peripatetics and the later Academic tradition, while others describe Pythagoreanism in the historical tradition, in Rome and in the pseudo-Pythagorean writings. The three great lives of Pythagoras by Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry and Iamblichus are also discussed in detail, as is the significance of Pythagoras for the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674539181
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
For this first English edition of his distinguished study of Pythagoreanism, Weisheit und Wissenschajt: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos, und Platon, Walter Burkert has carefully revised text and notes, taking account of additional literature on the subject which appeared between 1962 and 1969. By a thorough critical sifting of all the available evidence, the author lays a new foundation for the understanding of ancient Pythagoreanism and in particular of the relationship within it of "lore" and "science." He shows that in the twilight zone when the Greeks were discovering the rational interpretation of the world and quantitative natural science, Pythagoras represented not the origin of the new, but the survival or revival of ancient, pre-scientific lore or wisdom, based on superhuman authority and expressed in ritual obligation.

Author: Charles H. Kahn
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1603846824
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
A fascinating portrait of the Pythagorean tradition, including a substantial account of the Neo-Pythagorean revival, and ending with Johannes Kepler on the threshold of modernism.

Author: Leonid Zhmud
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191626384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Pythagoras (c. 570 - c. 495 BC), arguably the most influential thinker among the Presocratics, emerges in ancient tradition as a wise teacher, an outstanding mathematician, an influential politician, and as a religious and ethical reformer. He claimed to possess supernatural powers and was the kind of personality who attracted legends. In contrast to his controversial and elusive nature, the early Pythagoreans, such as the doctors Democedes and Alcmaeon, the Olympic victors Milon and Iccus, the botanist Menestor, the natural philosopher Hippon, and the mathematicians Hippasus and Theodorus, all appear in our sources as 'rational' as they can possibly be. It was this 'normality' that ensured the continued existence of Pythagoreanism as a philosophical and scientific school till c. 350 BC. This volume offers a comprehensive study of Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans through an analysis of the many representations of the Teacher and his followers, allowing the representations to complement and critique each other. Relying predominantly on sources dating back to before 300 BC, Zhmud portrays a more historical picture of Pythagoras, of the society founded by him, and of its religion than is known from the late antique biographies. In chapters devoted to mathematical and natural sciences cultivated by the Pythagoreans and to their philosophies, a critical distinction is made between the theories of individual figures and a generalized 'all-Pythagorean teaching', which is known from Aristotle.

Author: Sarah B. Pomeroy
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421409569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Abbreviations -- Chronology -- Introduction -- 1 Who Were the Pythagorean Women? -- 2 Wives, Mothers, Sisters, Daughters -- 3 Who Were the Neopythagorean Women Authors? -- 4 Introduction to the Prose Writings of Neopythagorean Women -- 5 The Letters and Treatises of Neopythagorean Women in the East -- 6 The Letters and Treatises of Neopythagorean Women in the West -- 7 The Neopythagorean Women as Philosophers -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- X -- Z.

Author: Eli Maor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196885
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
An exploration of one of the most celebrated and well-known theorems in mathematics By any measure, the Pythagorean theorem is the most famous statement in all of mathematics. In this book, Eli Maor reveals the full story of this ubiquitous geometric theorem. Although attributed to Pythagoras, the theorem was known to the Babylonians more than a thousand years earlier. Pythagoras may have been the first to prove it, but his proof—if indeed he had one—is lost to us. The theorem itself, however, is central to almost every branch of science, pure or applied. Maor brings to life many of the characters that played a role in its history, providing a fascinating backdrop to perhaps our oldest enduring mathematical legacy.

Author: Phillip Sidney Horky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190465700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Was Plato a Pythagorean? Plato's students and earliest critics thought so, but scholars since the nineteenth century have been more skeptical. With this probing study, Phillip Sidney Horky 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. Plato and Pythagoreanism 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.

Author: Irene Caiazzo
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004499466
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
For the first time, the reader can have a synoptic view of the reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, East and West, in a multicultural perspective. All the major themes of Pythagoreanism are addressed, from mathematics, number philosophy and metaphysics to ethics and religious thought.

Author: Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 1609253949
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
This anthology, the largest collection of Pythagorean writings ever to appear in English, contains the four ancient biographies of Pythagoras and over 25 Pythagorean and Neopythagorean writings from the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The material of this book is indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand the real spiritual roots of Western civilization.

Author: Kitty Ferguson
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 1848312504
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This is the story of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, whose insights transformed the ancient world and still inspire the realms of science, mathematics, philosophy and the arts. Einstein said that the most incredible thing about our universe was that it was comprehensible at all. As Kitty Ferguson explains, Pythagoras had much the same idea - but 2,500 years earlier. Though known by many only for his famous Theorem, in fact the pillars of our scientific tradition - belief that the universe is rational, that there is unity to all things, and that numbers and mathematics are a powerful guide to truth about nature and the cosmos - hark back to the convictions of this legendary scholar. Kitty Ferguson brilliantly evokes Pythagoras' ancient world of, showing how ideas spread in antiquity, and chronicles the incredible influence he and his followers have had on so many extraordinary people in the history of Western thought and science. 'Pythagoras' influence on the ideas, and therefore on the destiny, of the human race was probably greater than that of any single man before or after him' - Arthur Koestler.