There is no denying that they contributed greatly to the area of mathematics and philosophy. This sort of thinking does not appear to be based on any real philosophical principle and as a result becomes distasteful.Īll in all, they were a mystical society that placed great importance on the mathematical relations of the universe. They believed that the number eight was meant to represent justice while the number seven represented wisdom. The Pythagorean philosophy begins to grow drastically arbitrary the more you examine it. Other opposites included masculine and feminine, right and left, rest and motion, light and dark, good and evil, square and oblong. In this way they were said to represent the idea of limit. On the other hand, odd numbers cannot be divided by two, and therefore sets a limit to bipartition. It is believed that since even numbers can be divided by two again and again before inevitably reaching one, they were representative of the idea of unlimitedness. How they arrived at such a conclusion is uncertain. The most important of these opposites were the ideas of the limited and the unlimited, which was represented by odd and even numbers respectively. They concluded that harmony was a balancing of opposites. ![]() The Pythagoreans paid close attention to the idea of harmonies. This idea of a harmonious, single universe would be echoed by the likes of Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. In this way the universe came from a sort of chaos and took on a oneness that was previously unknown. Then, limitations were set upon the universe and the world as we know it fell into order objects became numerable, the cosmos became perceivable. It was proposed that there once existed chaos and disorder within an unstructured, infinite universe. This is probably due to their ideas on the formation of the universe. For instance, the Pythagoreans attributed great importance to the number one. Some were considered more holy than others. However, not all numbers were treated equally. They believed that numbers were the underlying substance of reality much in the way that Thales believe water to be origin of being in the universe. ![]() PythagorasAnd here we see the basis of the Pythagorean philosophy. However, the idea of creating a hypothetical universe without numbers is very much impossible. We could perhaps imagine a universe without smell or taste. The Pythagoreans concluded that the one universal quality of all things in the universe, the one thing that everything had in common, was that it was numerable and could be counted. The same can be said for smell, size, or shape. However, not all things are green, some things in this universe do not even possess a perceivable color. These qualities range dramatically and they are by no means universal. ![]() Certain things are different shapes, colors, or sizes. And so when examining the nature of the universe, a rather difficult brand of philosophy known as metaphysics, the Pythagoreans concluded the objects within reality could be differentiated by the qualities that they have.
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