[phi3301]Pythagoras and early pythagoreanism------We share the soul

#1 (21B7) Once he passed by as a puppy was being beaten, the story goes, and in pity said these words:"Stop, do not beat him, since it is the soul of a human, a friend of mine, which I recognized when I heard it crying."(Diogenes Laertius, Live of the philosophers 8.36)

When I looked at the name of Pythagoras, the first thing came into my mind was the Pythagoras theorem. Wait!I am pretty sure that this is a mathematical theorem, and Pythagoras was a mathematician. Why we put his name into a history of philosophy? To put this in a nutshell, Pythagoras thought that number was the key to understanding the cosmos. And it seems that he was trying to use "numbers" to explain the world.

Among all the materials, I found two interesting things about Pythagoras:

                -----His opinion about the soul

                -----Some of the doctrines that Pythagoras ordered his followers

First is his opinion about the soul, the related aphorism is #1,#8,#10.He thought the soul is immortal. And he believed that the soul could transfer from one to another, so the kind of people who knew everything was existing. But, in his immortal soul theory, a soul has to pass to an animal before it could arrive in another person. That's really interesting. It seems that we not only share the soul with our ancestors and our offsprings, but we also share our soul with other animals! Here is my question, why we have to pass our soul to another animal before my soul rest in another person's body? This doctrine maybe is adopted from the Egyptians, and Pythagoras could be the first person to introduce this kind of theory to ancient Greek. Even though it was not mentioned in the text, but maybe we can assume that, if Pythagoras lived in modern society, he would definitely be a biocentric. Every kind of animals including human beings are equal, as we shared the same souls.Just like the aphorism #1 goes, the pig holds the soul of my friends. I could tell it from the cry.

Another interesting thing was the doctrine that Pythagora ordered his followers. The related aphorism was #13. And I found more doctrines in The History of Western Philosophy (Russell). I'd like to share some of them, which I thought were really strange and funny:

           1.To abstain from beans

          2.Not to pick up what has fallen

          3.Not to break the bread

I am really curious how the Pythagoreanism made their bread?　Were they just baking the bread small enough to allow people to eat them up in one bite?

Animals have their own gods

"(B15) If horses had hands, or oxen or lions, or if they could draw with their hands and produce works as men do, then horses would draw figures of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and each would render the bodies to be of the same frame that each of them have." (Eclement, Miscellanies 5.110;tpc)

To be honest, I have no idea about Xenophanes' thoughts right now, as most of his work were poetry. I do think poetry is the most beautiful genre in the world, but at the same time, it is the most difficult to understand.

Luckily I learned something about his life.I know he was born c.570 BCE in Colophon, a city that close to the home of the Milesians and the home of Heraclitus. Perhaps that could explain why some of his views were influenced by the Milesians, and some of them have an effect on Heraclitus. Also, but as the text said it was unlikely, the ancient tradition indicated that Xenophanes was the teacher of Parmenides. And he was a philosopher, as well as poet.

And I do find something interesting when I read the book. In Xenophanes's opinion, every kind of people shares the same right of belief, and even the animals would share the same privilege of religion. As he said, if animals could have the ability of drawing, they could create their own "God": the horse-like God or the oxen- like God. Anyway, their God would not be the human-like God. Thus, he explained that the supreme God exists, but different from what Homer and Hesiod claimed, God is non-anthropomorphic. God was anthropomorphic only because human could draw and paint. 

I can't agree more with Xenophanes' perspective. And even though I hold the view that morality is objective, I believe every ethnic group could have their own God. And force other people to follow "your God" and advocate that only "your God" is the one that exists are the most crucial things around the world. That is part of the freedom of belief, that you could draw down your God in your mind.

[PHI 3301] The Milesians

It is really interesting to read something about the Milesians, the "earliest" philosophers. Maybe for us, who study philosophy, interested in philosophy or just curious about philosophy, the value of the Milesians is not their thoughts, but how they think and how they proved their thought.

I really like the story which is about Thales fell into a hole while thinking. It is funny in some aspects, and also it reminds me about what the philosophy is, and what a philosopher does. Different from the ordinary people, philosophers always think about something seems to be useless. Nevertheless, just these useless thinking built the fundament of philosophy. As what we read from the book, the original philosophy is born from the observation. Through the observation of the natural phenomenons and human activities, Thales believed that the basic stuff was water, and Anacimander though the originating point of the world was apeiron. Different from both of them, Anaximenes do not believe that the basic stuff was aer. And they employ their basic stuff to try to explain the world and the relationship among phenomenons. Their thoughts moved from the living to a more abstract and more unrealistic subject: How does the world construct?

It is obvious that the Milesians conducted their thoughts from the real world. They were more about explaining. And philosophy in that era was a combination of various subjects, which is definitely different from the philosophy we say today.