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?
Good question about the bread. I have no idea. Another reason Pythagoras is in the philosophical story has to do with seeing philosophy as a way of life.
ReplyDeleteYes, many philosophers are interested in finding explanations for the world and, as we've seen, many things are proposed as the key to such explanation, inlcuding numbers.
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