“Brhaspati! When they set in motion the first beginning of speech, giving names, their most pure and perfectly guarded secret was revealed through love. When the wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve, then friends recognized their friendships. A good sign was placed on their speech. …
A peculiar self-congratulatory narrative runs throughout contemporary accounts of the history of Western philosophy. According to this narrative, philosophy is, by its very nature, co-extensive with a process of demytholigization. Whereas Greek poets attempted to explain the world mythologically by invoking the unseen operations of gods and spiritual forces, Greek philosophy, on this account, was …
The Timaeus is one of Plato’s most historically influential dialogues, because it, unlike the others, was translated into Latin1 and preserved in the medieval world. Yet it is also one of the hardest to understand. The bulk of this “dialogue” consists of a monologue by Timaeus, a Pythagorean philosopher from Locri, who tells an imaginative …
In my last essay, I presented the myth of Pythagoras and argued for its abiding relevance.[1] I’d now like to move on to explore some of the basic teachings of Pythagoreanism and how those teachings have influenced the development of Greek philosophy. Specifically, this essay will examine the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, or the transmigration …