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Updated: May 12, 2025
The Pythagoreans, on the other hand, attributed perfection to the number ten; but agreed in thinking that the perfect number must be somehow realized in the heavens; and knowing only of nine heavenly bodies, to make up the enumeration, they asserted “that there was an antichthon, or counter-earth, on the other side of the sun, invisible to us.” Even Huygens was persuaded that when the number of the heavenly bodies had reached twelve, it could not admit of any further increase.
Among the Getae or Dacians in primeval times there had been associated with the king of the people a holy man called Zalmoxis, who, after having explored the ways and wonders of the gods in distant travel in foreign lands, and having thoroughly studied in particular the wisdom of the Egyptian priests and of the Greek Pythagoreans, had returned to his native country to endhis life as a pious hermit in a cavern of the "holy mountain."
A little later, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Copernicus gained from the Pythagoreans the crude notion of the earth's movement round a great central fire, and from it he elaborated the theory which was to revolutionize thought. Another half-century later the works of Archimedes were translated into Latin and for the first time printed.
Parmenides cleared up this ambiguity, not by affirming the existence of empty space, but by denying the possibility of such a thing, even before it had been asserted by any one. He saw that the Pythagoreans really implied it, though they were quite unconscious of the fact. He is interesting to us as the first philosopher who thought of expounding his system in verse.
But these Pythagoreans had numbers tattooed to them as mute and wordless as they were. Though numbers they nonetheless conveyed: Andrei Linde began a paradigm shift in cosmology that allowed for theories other than the Big Bang or Steady State theories when he proposed that the universe or universes were self-replicating and inflationary.
But it was not public teaching, known to the multitude; and except among the Pythagoreans, sophistry and speculation had impaired its vitality as a matter of faith or knowledge.
Nevertheless there are certain things which come out clearly enough, and it so happens that they are points of great importance from which we can learn something with regard to the philosophical problems of the present day. That is why he is so unsympathetic to the western schools of philosophy, and especially to the Pythagoreans and the Eleatics.
There is little doubt that he selected the term in order to mark the identity of the source of motion in the world with that in the animal organism. That again is in accordance with the scientific interests of the time. In his astronomical theories, however, Anaxagoras showed himself a true eastern Ionian, and lagged far behind the Pythagoreans.
The second, I said, would seem relatively to the ears to be what the first is to the eyes; for I conceive that as the eyes are designed to look up at the stars, so are the ears to hear harmonious motions; and these are sister sciences as the Pythagoreans say, and we, Glaucon, agree with them? Yes, he replied.
"It is impossible not to see in these lofty speculations the effect of the Greek mind, according to its own genius, seeking after God, if haply it might find Him." We now approach the second stage of Greek philosophy. The Ionic philosophers had sought to find the first principle of all things in the elements, and the Pythagoreans in number, or harmony and law, implying an intelligent creator.
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