Plato and Pythagoreanism

Phillip Sidney Horky 

 Oxford University Press | 2013 | 328 páginas | rar - pdf | 2,1 Mb

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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.

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
1. Aristotle on Mathematical Pythagoreanism in the Fourth Century bce 3
2. Hippasus of Metapontum and Mathematical Pythagoreanism 37
3 . Exoterism and the History of Pythagorean Politics 85
4 . Mathematical Pythagoreanism and Plato’s Cratylus 125
5 . What Is Wisest? Mathematical Pythagoreanism and Plato’s Phaedo 167
6 . Th e Method of the Gods: Mathematical Pythagoreanism and Discovery 201
Afterword 261
Bibliography 265
Index Locorum 281

General Index 295