Greece & Rome · c. 470–385 BCE
Philolaus
Pythagorean whose book first set out the school’s doctrines
Argued that the cosmos is made of “limiters” and “unlimiteds” fitted together by harmony, and that nothing can be known without number. He also moved the Earth from the centre of the cosmos, having it circle a central fire.
Life and thought
Philolaus came from Croton or Tarentum in southern Italy and was a contemporary of Socrates. In Plato’s Phaedo, two of Socrates’ young friends are said to have heard him teach at Thebes, where some Pythagoreans had gone after attacks on their communities in Italy. He wrote what was probably the first book by a Pythagorean, On Nature, of which about eleven fragments are judged genuine.
He argued that the cosmos and everything in it is fitted together from two kinds of thing: “unlimiteds”, such as stuffs, space and time, and “limiters”, the shapes and structures that bound them, joined by a harmony. Since all things that are known have number, number is what makes the world intelligible. His astronomy was bold: the Earth is not the centre but one of the bodies circling a central fire, with a “counter-earth” on the far side. Aristotle’s report that Pythagoreans thought “things are numbers” is largely his own reading of Philolaus.