Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic: A Commentary on the Fragments and Testimonia with Interpretive Essays

by Philolaus, Carl A. Huffman (Translator)

This is the first comprehensive study for nearly 200 years of what remains of the writings of the Presocratic philosopher Philolaus of Croton (470-390 B.C.). Professor Huffman presents the fragments and testimonia with accompanying translations and introductory chapters and interpretive commentary. He produces further arguments for the authenticity of much that used to be neglected, and undertakes a critique of Aristotle's testimony, opening the way for a quite new reading of fifth-century Pythagoreanism in general and of Philolaus in particular.

Genres: Philosophy, Classics

464 pages, Hardcover

First published July 22, 1993

About the author

Philolaus of Croton, in southern Italy, was a Greek philosopher/scientist, who lived from ca. 470 to ca. 385 BCE and was thus a contemporary of Socrates. He is one of the three most prominent figures in the Pythagorean tradition, born a hundred years after Pythagoras himself and fifty years before Archytas. He wrote one book, On Nature, which was probably the first book to be written by a Pythagorean. There has been considerable controversy concerning the 20+ fragments which have been preserved in Philolaus' name. It is now generally accepted that some eleven of the fragments come from his genuine book. Other books were forged in Philolaus' name at a later date, and the remaining fragments come from these spurious works. Philolaus argues that the cosmos and everything in it is made up of two basic types of things, limiters and unlimiteds. Unlimiteds are continua undefined by any structure or quantity; they include the traditional Pre Socratic material elements such as earth, air, fire and water but also space and time. Limiters set limits in such unlimiteds and include shapes and other structural principles. Limiters and unlimiteds are not combined in a haphazard way but are subject to a “fitting together” or “harmonia,” which can be described mathematically. Philolaus' primary example of such a harmonia of limiters and unlimiteds is a musical scale, in which the continuum of sound is limited according to whole number ratios, so that the octave, fifth, and fourth are defined by the ratios 2 : 1, 3 : 2 and 4 : 3, respectively. Since the whole world is structured according to number, we only gain knowledge of the world insofar as we grasp these numbers. The cosmos comes to be when the unlimited fire is fitted together with the center of the cosmic sphere (a limiter) to become the central fire. Philolaus was the precursor of Copernicus in moving the earth from the center of the cosmos and making it a planet, but in Philolaus' system it does not orbit the sun but rather the central fire. The astronomical system is a significant attempt to try to explain the phenomena but also has mythic and religious significance. Philolaus presented a medical theory in which there was a clear analogy between the birth of a human being and the birth of the cosmos. The embryo is conceived of as composed of the hot and then as drawing in cooling breath immediately upon birth, just as the cosmos begins with the heat of the central fire, which then draws in breath along with void and time from the unlimited. Philolaus posited a strict hierarchy of psychic faculties, which allows him to distinguish human beings from animals and plants. He probably believed that the transmigrating soul was a harmonious arrangement of physical elements located in the heart and that the body became ensouled when the proper balance of hot and cold was established by the breathing of the new-born infant. Philolaus' genuine book was one of the major sources for Aristotle's account of Pythagorean philosophy. There is controversy as to whether or not Aristotle's description of the Pythagoreans as equating things with numbers is an accurate account of Philolaus' view. Plato mentions Philolaus in the Phaedo and adapts Philolaus' metaphysical scheme for his own purposes in the Philebus.

Reviews

[Nathan Casebolt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Donald Duck was the first to teach me about the Pythagoreans in Disney’s 1959 educational cartoon “Donald in Mathmagic Land.” I don't know what they would’ve made of the short’s depiction of their secrecy or their musical and mathematical theories. Who knows — perhaps they would’ve drawn comfort from the thought that an angry duck would preserve their memory even as Cylon of Croton led the revolt in the late 6th century B.C. that ended with their murders and Pythagoras’s exile.

Knowing what the Pythagoreans thought about anything is the burning question at the center of Carl A. Huffman’s work on the fragments of Philolaus, last of the creed who flourished in the early 5th century B.C. Because the teachings of Pythagoras were cloaked in secrecy, few followers were willing to put them in print. “The book of Philolaus,” Huffman writes, “is also likely to be the first book written by a Pythagorean” and “the first to make Pythagorean ideas public.” None of this sect’s works have survived; so when Huffman sets out to interpret Philolaus, all he has are quotes and paraphrases that may or may not be accurate, not to mention remnants of later forgeries.

The way in which Huffman pushes his way through this crowd is what most interests me, but a word about his destination is in order. Pythagoreanism had a mystical bent to it, but Huffman asserts it was more lifestyle than doctrine. We can no more presume to know Philolaus’s thought on the basis of his Pythagoreanism than we can presume to know what a modern Catholic thinks just because he’s Catholic. Instead, Huffman argues, “Philolaus deserves a prominent place in the history of Greek philosophy, as the first thinker self-consciously and thematically to employ mathematical ideas to solve philosophical problems.” Huffman positions him among the rationalists in so far as “Philolaus makes principles of order prior to mechanical causation…and envisions the cosmos as held together by mathematical proportion of some sort…he is the clear precursor of Plato.”

This seems clear enough, but getting here takes work for the same reason any approach to ancient texts takes work. In the case of a book that survives in bits and pieces, the scholar must fight the temptation to emend ancient texts in ways that seem more rational to the modern mind: “Surely it is correct methodology to base our interpretation of Philolaus on the texts preserved in the manuscript tradition and only alter those texts when they are ungrammatical or when they give a sense that is seriously defective; otherwise we are in danger of rewriting Philolaus in our own image.”

Once Huffman picks his way through the textual critics, he finds the Neoplatonists of the third century A.D. and beyond who sought to fuse Plato and Aristotle into a grand contemplation of the one transcendent world soul. Authors in this tradition published many books in Philolaus’s name as part of their project for proving a straight line of truth from Pythagoras to the two great philosophers. A standard criterion for filtering out these spurious works, adopted here by Huffman, is to reject “Philolaic” writings so loaded with Platonic, Aristotelian, or later jargon as to be obvious forgeries of a later time.

Huffman’s work is still not done, however. Having sifted the fragments down to a less unacceptable set, he still lacks a criterion to decide which are probably genuine and — from these — to reconstruct a philosophy of Philolaus. For this, he turns to Aristotle. Although “Aristotle is very prone to reformulate earlier philosophy in his own terminology and for his own dialectical purposes,” he is also a careful observer and inveterate categorizer. Unlike the Neoplatonists, he distinguishes Platonic thought from Pythagorean. Also, it’s likely Aristotle derived much of his knowledge of Pythagoreanism from Philolaus’s book since, again, there weren’t a lot of such books floating around. Thus, says Huffman, if a supposedly Philolaic fragment rhymes with Pythagorean thought as Aristotle presents it, and if no other considerations argue against it, that fragment is probably genuine.

What emerges from this set of scraps is “a system in the Presocratic tradition of rational speculation about the cosmos rather than in the tradition of mythography” that “shows some basic differences from other Presocratics in ways that look forward to Plato.” Where most Presocratics puzzled over what reality is at its core, Philolaus was more interested in its structure. With his Pythagorean interest in the way numbers describe the universe, he proposed an order based on a numeric “harmony” that binds “unlimiteds” and “limiters” in mathematical precision. Math dorks, rejoice! Your master cometh.

To be sure, Philolaus is happy enough to fill gaps with his favorite numbers. He envisions a sacred fiery hearth at the center of the universe, around which circles the Earth, moon, sun, five planets, and the stars. That’s nine concentric circles; but ten is sacred, so there must be a tenth counter-earth between us and the hearth that we can never see because our surface is always turned away from it. “Philolaus’ attitude,” writes Huffman, “is very similar to Plato’s. He puts more confidence in his theory that the cosmos is constructed according to pleasing mathematical principles than in the observational data, and is more willing to suppose that the data are defective than that the theory is.”

Still, his love of order yields “a much more coherent model of the cosmos than any other fifth-century thinker…Such a model is crude…but it is a model that is articulated enough to elicit criticisms based on the phenomena and to encourage the production of more sophisticated models.” Philolaus extends his interest in harmony to the human body, a cosmos in miniature, “constituted by unlimiteds (such as hot and cold) and limiters (such as the process of breathing) which are ‘fitted together’ in a balanced way.” Perhaps most remarkably, Huffman says of Philolaus’s contribution to the study of human psychology:

“What is clearly striking and new is that Philolaus distinguishes sharply between a number of psychic faculties and then arranges all of these faculties in a coherent system. Such systematization is just what we would expect from someone who emphasized the role of limit and harmony in the cosmos. It is hard to appreciate the significance of this step because such systematization becomes commonplace in Plato and Aristotle, but it is precisely this emphasis on structure and system in psychology that Philolaus bequeathed to the giants who followed him.”

Huffman argues a clear and reasonable case for a Philolaic cosmology that proved an advance on his contemporaries in terms of its falsifiability. I agree with this, and — provisionally — that Philolaus’s psychological theories, if we’ve understood them properly, are a notable advance toward the theories of Plato and Aristotle that would dominate Western thought for millennia. Whether we truly have understood Philolaus properly on the subject of the human psyche, or whether we’ve fallen for Neoplatonic cosplay despite our best efforts, is a serious but unanswerable question. I don’t deny that Philolaus was a significant figure who influenced those who came after, but the degree to which he did so is beyond the capacity of our sources to say. Some things can never be fully settled, not even by Donald Duck.