Was Plato a Pythagorean? Plato's students and earliest critics thought so, but later scholars have been more skeptical. Plato and Pythagoreanism reconsiders this question by arguing that a specific type of Pythagorean philosophy, called "mathematical" Pythagoreanism, played a profound role in Plato's philosophy.

This book presents an up-to-date overview of the main new directions taken by ancient philosophy in the first century BC, a period in which the dominance exercised in the Hellenistic age by Stoicism, Epicureanism and Academic Scepticism gave way to a more diverse and experimental philosophical scene. Its development has been much less well understood, but here a strong international team of leading scholars of the subject reconstruct key features of the changed environment. They examine afresh the evidence for some of the central Greek thinkers of the period, as well as illuminating Cicero's engagement with Plato both as translator and in his own philosophising. The intensity of renewed study of Aristotle's Categories and Plato's Timaeus is an especially striking outcome of their discussions. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and students interested in the history of Platonism and Aristotelianism.

This is a comprehensive, authoritative and innovative account of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, one of the most enigmatic and influential philosophies in the West. In twenty-one chapters covering a timespan from the sixth century BC to the seventeenth century AD, leading scholars construct a number of different images of Pythagoras and his community, assessing current scholarship and offering new answers to central problems. Chapters are devoted to the early Pythagoreans, and the full breadth of Pythagorean thought is explored including politics, religion, music theory, science, mathematics and magic. Separate chapters consider Pythagoreanism in Plato, Aristotle, the Peripatetics and the later Academic tradition, while others describe Pythagoreanism in the historical tradition, in Rome and in the pseudo-Pythagorean writings. The three great lives of Pythagoras by Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry and Iamblichus are also discussed in detail, as is the significance of Pythagoras for the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

For this first English edition of his distinguished study of Pythagoreanism, Weisheit und Wissenschajt: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos, und Platon, Walter Burkert has carefully revised text and notes, taking account of additional literature on the subject which appeared between 1962 and 1969. By a thorough critical sifting of all the available evidence, the author lays a new foundation for the understanding of ancient Pythagoreanism and in particular of the relationship within it of "lore" and "science." He shows that in the twilight zone when the Greeks were discovering the rational interpretation of the world and quantitative natural science, Pythagoras represented not the origin of the new, but the survival or revival of ancient, pre-scientific lore or wisdom, based on superhuman authority and expressed in ritual obligation.

For the first time, the reader can have a synoptic view of the reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, East and West, in a multicultural perspective. All the major themes of Pythagoreanism are addressed, from mathematics, number philosophy and metaphysics to ethics and religious thought.

In ancient tradition, Pythagoras emerges as a wise teacher, an outstanding mathematician, an influential politician, and as a religious and ethical reformer. This volume offers a comprehensive study of Pythagoras, Pythagoreanism, and the early Pythagoreans through an analysis of the many representations of the individual and his followers.

Bringing together geometry and philosophy, this book undertakes a strikingly original study of the origins and significance of the Pythagorean theorem. Thales, whom Aristotle called the first philosopher and who was an older contemporary of Pythagoras, posited the principle of a unity from which all things come, and back into which they return upon dissolution. He held that all appearances are only alterations of this basic unity and there can be no change in the cosmos. Such an account requires some fundamental geometric figure out of which appearances are structured. Robert Hahn argues that Thales came to the conclusion that it was the right triangle: by recombination and repackaging, all alterations can be explained from that figure. This idea is central to what the discovery of the Pythagorean theorem could have meant to Thales and Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE. With more than two hundred illustrations and figures, Hahn provides a series of geometric proofs for this lost narrative, tracing it from Thales to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans who followed, and then finally to Plato's Timaeus. Uncovering the philosophical motivation behind the discovery of the theorem, Hahn's book will enrich the study of ancient philosophy and mathematics alike.

A fascinating portrait of the Pythagorean tradition, including a substantial account of the Neo-Pythagorean revival, and ending with Johannes Kepler on the threshold of modernism.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.