Philolaus
of Croton lived from around 470 to
around 385 BC, which makes him a contemporary of Socrates and Democritus, and
in the timeline of the Pythagoreans puts him a hundred years after Pythagoras
and fifty years before Archytas. He is known to have written a work with the
predictable fashionable title On Nature. It consisted of three books: On
Cosmos; On Physis; and On Psyche. This work has long been lost, with
only a few fragments extant, but we know that it was real, because Plato had it
bought for him in Sicily and made comments on it. In all, there are a little
over twenty fragments all attributed to Philolaus, but only eleven are known to
be genuinely his.
He
was undisputedly an important scientist and philosopher, but Nietzsche chooses
to ignore him, while in W. T. Jones’s History of Philosophy there is no
mention of Philolaus at all, however, there is a subsection The World
Process, in his Pythagorean section, where he discusses cosmology, which in
essence recapitulates the theory attributed to Philolaus.
Russell
has a paragraph about Philolaus, right after he presents a summary of the
Pythagorean astronomy. It is not necessary to quote that summary, as we are
going to discuss this subject later in this entry, but here is the interesting
paragraph on Philolaus:
“This Pythagorean theory is attributed to Philolaus, a Theban, who
lived at the end of the fifth century BC. Although it is fanciful and in part
quite unscientific, it is very important, since it involves the greater part of
the imaginative effort required for conceiving the Copernican hypothesis. To
conceive of the earth, not as the center of the universe, but as one among the
planets, not as externally fixed, but as wandering through space, showed
extraordinary emancipation from anthropocentric thinking. When once this jolt
had been given to men’s natural picture of the universe, it was not so very
difficult to be led by scientific arguments to a more accurate theory.”
According
to Aristotle, Philolaus argues that the cosmos, and everything in it, is made
up of two basic types of things: the limiters and unlimiteds,
also called principles: the Limit and the Unlimited. The latter
type is undefined by any structure or quantity; these include the traditional
Pre-Socratic material elements, such as earth, air, fire, and water, but also
continua, such as space and time. Limiters set limits in such unlimiteds, and
include shapes and other structural principles. Limiters and unlimiteds are
never combined at random, but are subject to a “fitting together,” or
“harmonia,” which can be described mathematically. Philolaus’s 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, the fifth, and the fourth are defined by the ratios 2:1, 4:3, and 3:2,
respectively. And, since the whole world is structured according to number, we
only gain knowledge of the world in so far as we grasp these numbers.
The
Unlimited is conceived as a boundless breath, a mass of indeterminacy
and indefiniteness. The Limit is seen, rather confusingly, both as fire and as
a number. All numbers are generated by partition from the Unit ergo the
principles of the world are indeed the infinite and the unit. The cosmos comes
into existence when the “central fire” (called “the house of Zeus” or “the
Mother of the gods”) becomes the center of the cosmic sphere. Philolaus
does not identify the central fire with the sun, as Copernicus would do two
millennia later, but having moved the earth away from the central position and
by making it a planet, he still deserves to be called Copernicus’s precursor,
even if the rest of his cosmology is obfuscated in myth and religious fantasy.
Concerning the astronomical system of Philolaus, there is some disagreement.
All sources agree on the fact that he was the main developer of the Pythagorean
idea of earth’s sphericity and status as a planet. But they are reluctant to
give too much credit to Philolaus, because of the other mythology and his
careless dismissal of the sun as the center of the planetary system. Copernicus
himself, however, believed that he had already known about the Earth’s
revolution in a circular orbit around the sun, supposing the latter to be a
mere disk of glass reflecting the light of the universe.
Aside
from his astronomy, Philolaus is also known for his medical theory, in which he
likens the birth of the child to the birth of the cosmos. The latter begins
from the heat of the central fire, next drawing in a cooling breath, sucking in
both the void and time from the outside sphere of the unlimited. In his analogy,
the unborn child is composed of the hot, balancing this hot with the cold upon
its very first breath when coming out of the mother’s womb.
And
now again, as a recap, it is extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to
establish to whom among the Pythagoreans belongs the origin of any particular
idea, or to what extent any such idea was developed by a particular member of
the Pythagorean Order. One of their rules, I have noted, included the
commonness of all possessions, including the anonymity of their ideas among
them. But even though we know little about Philolaus, and many historians of
philosophy are reluctant to involve themselves in discussing his originality
and personal contribution to philosophy and the sciences, it is quite obvious
that omitting his name from the list of the great pre-Socratic philosophers
simply on those grounds would be an act of unfairness and a very unnecessary
punctiliousness, which we are absolutely loath to permit.
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