4 - The Man With The Golden Thigh: Pythagoras
Posted on 27 December 2010
Peter discusses the Pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras, as well as Pythagoreanism and the role of mathematics in ancient philosophy.
Press 'play' to hear the podcast:
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
Further Reading:
W. Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. E.L. Minar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life, trans. J.M. Dillon and J. Hershbell (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991).
C.H. Kahn, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: a Brief History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001).
- Add new comment
- 14044 reads
Universe is made from numbers - Pythagoras
This podcast has a wonderful sychronicity to the interview I listened to last week on vortex-based mathematics. One of the quotes from that broadcast of Feb 2013: "Numbers are three dimensional living geometry"
Assassinate the number 7?
Lakoff & Nunez suggest that the embodied mind brings mathematics into being, so to "assassinate the number 7", wouldn't you simply (!) need to "assassinate all humans"?
Are there any Ancient Philosophers who thought this way, or did they all follow Pythagoras in thinking of numbers as something "out there", existing in an "ideal space" forever?
Mathematics as mental constructs
Perhaps Aristotle comes closer to this kind of view than Plato, since he talks for instance of geometrical figures as being made out of "intelligible matter." In a few episodes I'll be doing an interview with Serafina Cuomo, an expert on ancient mathematics, so you may find that that sheds some further light.