- Home
- Presocratics
- Socrates and Plato
- Socrates without Plato
- Plato's Socrates
- Woolf on Socrates
- Plato's Life and Works
- Charmides & Euthydemus
- Plato's Gorgias
- Plato's Meno
- Plato's Theaetetus
- McCabe on Plato
- Plato's Phaedo
- Plato's Republic, pt.1
- Plato's Republic, pt.2
- Plato's Parmenides
- Leigh on the Sophist
- Plato's Cratylus
- Plato's Timaeus
- Symposium & Phaedrus
- Sheffield on Plato
- Plato on Myth
- Aristotle
- Aristotle Life and Works
- Aristotle Logic
- Aristotle Epistemology
- Benson on Aristotle
- Aristotle on Substance
- Aristotle Four Causes
- Aristotle Physics
- Sorabji on Aristotle
- Aristotle on Soul
- Aristotle Biology
- Aristotle Ethics 1
- Aristotle Ethics 2
- Scott on Aristotle
- Aristotle on Mind & God
- Aristotle Political
- Aristotle Rhetoric
- Aristotle on Plato
- Successors
- Hellenistic
- Introduction
- Cynics
- Cyrenaics
- Epicurus Principles
- Epicurus Ethics
- Epicurus Therapy
- Lucretius
- Warren on Epicurus
- Stoic Logic
- Stoic Epistemology
- Stoic Physics
- Stoic Ethics
- Sedley on Stoicism
- Seneca
- Epictetus
- Marcus Aurelius
- Sellars Roman Stoics
- Pyrrho
- New Academy
- Cicero
- Woolf on Cicero
- Sextus Empiricus
- Long on the Self
- Ancient medicine
- Hankinson on Galen
- Late Antiquity
- Timeline
- Blog
- Comments
- Links
4 - The Man With The Golden Thigh: Pythagoras
Posted on 27 December 2010
In this episode, Peter Adamson 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)
- Add new comment
- 6400 reads
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.