Pythagoras was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and musician. He was born on the island of Samos in the approximate year 570 BC. Ç. and died, probably, in 496 BC. Ç.. He spent much of his life in the old region of MagnaGreece (current Italian territory) and there he founded his philosophical school.
Little is known about the life of the pre-Socratic thinker due to the distancehistoric that separates him from us. What is known, in general, comes from ancient historians and philosophers such as Herodotus, Xenophanes and Aristotle. Pythagoras was well known for having merged his knowledge of Philosophy, Astronomy, Geometry and Music in a sect, garnering faithful followers of his doctrine, Pythagoreanism.
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Biography
Today we have fewinformation about the life of the pre-Socratic thinker, due to the historical and chronological distance that separates us from him. What little we know comes from writings left by ancient philosophers and historians, such as Xenophanes, Herodotus and
Aristotle. There are also no writings and files authored by Pythagoras for us to analyze his philosophy with certainty of authorship.It is known that the thinker was born on the Island of we are in 570 BC Ç. and probably had contact with Anaximander, thinker of the Ionian School and disciple of Thales, the first western philosopher. In life, he founded a sect, the Pythagorean sect, which gave rise to the Pythagorean School of pre-Socratic philosophy. His sect, which mixed Mathematics, Philosophy, Astronomy and Music in a religious doctrine, sought to purify the soul through knowledge and thought.
Pythagoras was an outstanding geometer, leaving as his main contribution to Mathematics the discovery of the relationship of equality between the square of the hypotenuse and the sum of the squares of the legs inside a right triangle, what became known like Pythagorean theorem.
The theorem relating the square of the hypotenuse and the sum of the squares of the legs is one of the great contributions of Pythagoras.
Music was also the object of study by the thinker, who discovered a scale of musical tones different from what it was used until then, in which he calculated the difference between the notes (or tones) of the scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, there, yes, sorry...).
THE Pythagorean School, as a sect, was very closed. One of its members, Hipaso de Metaponto, is said to have been “excommunicated”, perhaps even murdered by the Pythagoreans for having discovered something that contradicted all Pythagorean cosmological and mathematical knowledge: numbers irrational.
Philosophy
The context of pre-Socratic philosophy is that of an attempt to discovery of what makes up and originates the universe, that in the Ancient Greece was called cosmology. From the Ionians, through the Pythagoreans and arriving in the Eleatics and pluralists, what was wanted at the time was to point out the probable origin of the entire Universe, since the mythological cosmogonies were not enough to explain the origin.
Pythagoras, when trying to point out a cosmological origin, sees an organization or codificationnumericalessential. In this way, he attributed to the digit 1 (which represents the idea of unity and starting point) the entire beginning of the Universe. For Pythagoras and his followers, there was an intrinsic relationship between Music, Mathematics, the cosmological organization and the composition of people's souls (his sect believed in the transmigration of bodies by souls, or reincarnation), as all these natural elements were, in the Pythagorean view, governed by orders. numerical.
Pythagorean sect
The Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation of the soul or the transmigrationinbodies. The sect's doctrine was based on a purification of the soul through bodily life, for that was the the purpose of material life, until the soul reached a state of total purification and attainment of life eternal.
This purification would only be achieved through access to knowledge and wisdom. Aristotle stated that Pythagoras was the creator of the word philosopher (lover of wisdom), which attests to his defense of a quest for wisdom as a way to evolve.
Know more: Read about Aristotle's metaphysics
Pythagoras and music
Like all natural elements, music was, in the Pythagorean view, a numerical relationship. This idea is well founded and holds up to this day, as the relationships between tones, semitones and other musical elements are measured and classified by numbers.
Pythagoras revolutionized ancient music by discovering a new tone scale, different from the scale that was used until then, and in the creation of a musical instrument, the monochord. His instrument applied the Pythagorean notion of dividing the string in exact spaces to have different tones, crossing the musical scale and reaching more or less high octaves. This Pythagorean discovery allowed the creation of modern stringed instruments such as the guitar and piano.
Metapoint Hypasus
The case of Hipasus remains an unsolved mystery to this day. The thinker was one of the followers of the Pythagorean sect. In his studies of Mathematics, the mystic discovered a new numerical relationship through the study of Geometry. it was about the numbersirrational. It turns out that the theory of irrational numbers clashed with the Pythagorean cosmological theory.
Some sources say that the Pythagoreans expelled Hipasus and they made a symbolic burial of him, who would have wandered for a while and committed suicide as self-punishment. Other sources say that Hipasus was executed by the Pythagoreans. The extent to which the theories are correct and the degree of involvement of Pythagoras with the case of Hypasus is not clear.
Thinkers influenced by Pythagoras
Pythagorean philosophy influenced many other philosophers, mathematicians and scientists after him. Only in Greece have we seen in Plato and Aristotle echoes of Pythagorean philosophy. For Plato, the transmigration of the soul (reincarnation) did happen and the search for higher rational knowledge was a way of getting closer to the soul and the divine elements.
Aristotle goes back to Pythagoras to look for elements that corroborate his philosophy, essentially the mathematical ideas of universal codification. Other thinkers like Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Isaac Newton, Leibniz and Kepler they were somehow influenced by Pythagoras.
by Francisco Porfirio
Philosophy teacher