Incomplete Pythagoras Essay essays

Incomplete Pythagoras Essay essays Pythagoras: A Great Man (or A Great Myth) Pythagoras, my adopted philosopher, was a man of great stature, a man who had a cult of followers, a man who is believed to be a product of the school of Anaximander , a man whose beliefs lead to his exile from his communities home in Kroton , and a man who for all intents and purposes may have never existed. Pythagoras and those who followed him, often referred to in the world of philosophy as Pythagoreans, were prone to the belief that everything: the natural world, human beings, and their interactions among one another were the product of numbers. Now when I use the term numbers I use it the same terms that the Greeks solely used it, in the term of geometric figures or dimensions. Pythagoras was originally from Samos and traveled to Kroton and started a community that was both a religious cult and a scientific school. This school often was the object of jealousy and thus many of the accounts that we receive of Pythagoras are accounts that he was merely a myth, not an actual person. This is a fact that is highly debated in the intellectual world even to this day. Those who believe that he is man and not a myth are oftentimes skeptic about those who write about Pythagoras truly as myth. With those who are certain he is myth doubt the accounts of his followers that he was a true man. It is my belief that the fact that he is written about as both myth and man is no reason to believe he never truly existed. One does, however, have to understand that since he never truly wrote anything himself it is hard to know what doctrines of the Pythagoreans are the products of Pythagoras himself or those of the Pythagorean community. It was the Pythagorean belief that everything had a number and if one could understand all the formulas of the numbers one would be able to predict or know all things. This system of beliefs worked rather well when the Pythagoreans dealt with the notions of Astron...