![]() From Aristotle on, the view has been that number (or the even and the odd) occupies first place in Philolaus’ thought. Huffman’s most important revisions concentrate on the role of number in Philolaus. Boeckh’s Philolaus des Pythagoreers Lehren nebst den Bruchstücken seines Werkes of 1819, Philolaus of Croton is a clear and well-argued book in which Huffman provides an important reevaluation of the Philolaus fragments and testimonia and a significant rethinking of Philolaus’ views. The first book devoted to Philolaus alone since A. Carl Huffman’s notable new book on Philolaus offers us a philosopher who is, as Huffman puts it in the subtitle, both a Pythagorean and a Presocratic. Some of these questions can now be answered. Was Philolaus an anomalous figure, whose interests were radically different from those of, say, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus (his closest philosophical contemporaries, according to Huffman, pp. If Philolaus was, as Burkert suggested, more of a mythologist than an astronomer, whose interest in number was as a number-mystic as Burkert claimed, why should he count as a philosopher or one of the mathematici at all? Further, both Burkert’s and Guthrie’s treatments leave unanswered the larger question of the relation of the Pythagoreans to other Presocratic thinkers. Minar, Jr., Harvard University Press, 1972), but his treatment of Philolaus raised almost as many questions as it answered. Light was shed on early Pythagoreanism by Walter Burkert in his Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (translated by E. The split of what seems to have been the second generation of Pythagoreans into the acusmatici and the mathematici (and the ambiguous evidence concerning the nature of the split and who was responsible for it) only makes things worse. We know little of Pythagoras himself, and untangling the convoluted reports of Plato, Aristotle, and the later commentators is a daunting task. The Pythagoreans have never fit easily into the history of Presocratic thought.
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