Pythagorean Thinking
There is a young boy named Jimmy sitting at his desk in his home. Jimmy is a freshman in high school aspiring to attend college and become successful in life. Jimmy is attempting to complete his geometry homework while he is listening to the new Three Doors Down album. Does Jimmy realize that the geometry he is calculating and even the music he is listening to were both highly influenced by one man and his way of thinking? That man is Pythagoras and that way of thinking has been named Pythagoreanism. Pythagorean thinking has been shared by many people in the past by unifying mathematics with the purification of the soul and has had great influence on modern western culture. Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos around 550 B.C. (Loomis 7). He must be considered one of the world's greatest men, but he wrote nothing, and it is hard to say how much of the doctrine we know as Pythagorean thinking is due to the founder of the society and how much is later development ("Harmony" 1). Sometimes he is represented as a man of science, a man of mathematics, a man of music, and sometimes as a preacher of religious doctrines, and we might be tempted to regard one or other of those characters as historical
However, today Pythagorean thinking is less prominent and is used by carpenters who "make right angles by measuring off six and eight feet in such a manner that a 'ten-foot' pole completes the triangle" (Loomis 11). Although there is a large body of Pythagorean literature, many people feel that it was borrowed or copied from Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic material. The group believed in many things had to do with numbers. The Acusmatici became wandering ascetics, finally joining the Cynics of the fourth century B. In terms of caring for their soul, Pythagoreans felt that they needed discipline not only for their body, but for their mind as well. The two factors which separated the groups the most were the function of number symbolism in ritual, and the very obsessive role of ideas of order, measure, and organization in the Pythagorean way of life (Philip 14). Their number theories alleged that everything in the physical world could be explained by mathematics. One was called the Acusmatici, whose members emphasized the observation of the special Pythagorean way of life taught by the master himself. Perhaps the same unifying principle could be applied elsewhere; and where better to try then with the puzzle of the heavens themselves" (Ferrera 267). The Mathematici group eventually became closely associated with the doctrine of Plato and his followers, who established the Platonic Academy. The truth is that there is no need to reject his unique views. Such a group was bound to excite jealousy and mistrust, and we hear of many struggles. Soon after these great discoveries of Pythagoras and his death, the Pythagoreans separated into two distinct groups. Plato later combined the two themes when he declared that the soul was an intermediary between intelligibles and sensibles, with both of those to be mathematically determined ("Doctrines" 2).
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