Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans - Department of Mathematics

Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans 5
the “virtue of contemplation” acquired theological endorsement, and
because the ideal of disinterested truth dignified the academic life.
The Pythagorean Philosophy ála Bertrand Russell
From Bertrand Russell, 5 ,wehave
“It is to this gentleman that we owe pure mathematics.
The contemplative ideal — since it led to pure mathematics
— was the source of a useful activity. This increased it’s
prestige and gave it a success in theology, in ethics, and in
philosophy.”
Mathematics, so honored, became the model for other sciences.
Thought became superior to the senses; intuition became superior to
observation. The combination of mathematics and theology began with
Pythagoras. It characterized the religious philosophy in Greece, in the
Middle ages, and down through Kant. In Plato, Aquinas, Descartes,
Spinoza and Kant there is a blending of religion and reason, of moral
aspiration with logical admiration of what is timeless.
Platonism was essentially Pythagoreanism. The whole concept
of an eternal world revealed to intellect but not to the senses can be
attributed from the teachings of Pythagoras.
The Pythagorean School gained considerable influence in Croton
and became politically active — on the side of the aristocracy. Probably
because of this, after a time the citizens turned against him and his
followers, burning his house. Forced out, he moved to Metapontum,
also in Southern Italy. Here he died at the age of eighty. His school lived
on, alternating between decline and re-emergence, for several hundred
years. Tradition holds that Pythagoras left no written works, but that
hisideaswerecarriedonbyeagerdisciples.
5 A History of Western Philosophy. Russell was a logician, mathematician and philosopher from
the Þrst half of the twentieth century. He is known for attempting to bring pure mathematics
into the scope of symbolic logic and for discovering some profound paradoxes in set theory.