Ancient Philosophy · Part 3 · The first philosophers · B1–B2
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans
Part 3 of Ancient Philosophy: Pythagoras is the most famous name in Greek mathematics, and the one we know least about. He wrote nothing, his followers kept secrets, and most of the stories about him were written eight hundred years later. Deduction about the past (he must have…, he might have…, he can’t have…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Pythagoras! The triangle man! I learned his theorem at school.
Did he discover it? That is a very good question to start with.
I love the Pythagoreans. They saw that the world is made of number, and so do I.
And they had strange rules, I heard. Something about beans.
Yes. Tonight we will be detectives again: what must have been true, what might have been, and what can’t have been.
Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos around 570 BCE. Around 530 BCE he moved to Croton, a Greek city in southern Italy, where he founded a community of followers, men and women, who lived by strict rules, shared their property and kept their teachings secret.
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