Philolaus

Philolaus (also called Philolaus of Taranto or Philolaus of Crotona), (Greek: Φιλόλαος, Philolaos) (ca. 470 BC – ca. 380 BC) was a pre-Socratic Pythagorean Greek philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, politician, theoretician of music and writer.

He considered that all matter is composed of limited and unlimited things linked by harmony, and that the universe is determined by numbers. He is credited with having originated the hypothesis that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, a theory included in the Pythagorean astronomical system.

Life

He was from Magna Graecia, a former region of southern Italy with numerous Greek colonies. It is not known for sure which colony he was from: Crotona, Taranto or Metaponto.

Philolaus belonged to the Pythagorean School, established in Crotona, being a disciple of Pythagoras and probably of Aresas. In Thebes he was the teacher of Simmias and Cebes, who would later become disciples of Socrates.

Diogenes Laercio points out, citing an epigram of his time, that he would have been killed by the rebellion of the Crotonians, who would have suspected that Philolaus was preparing the installation of a tyranny in the city.

Philosophy

He participated in and developed Pythagorean cosmology, understanding a regular, predictable and arithmetic universe in which planets and stars revolve. Among them appears the Earth, which rotates in a circular orbit, so it appears endowed with movement, unlike the universes of the Ionians. In addition, he explained the diurnal movement of the Earth based on its rotation around a fixed central point in space.

For Philolaus, the cosmos is made up of a central fire, called Hestia, and nine bodies that revolve around it: Antichton, the Earth, the Moon, the Sun (a glass sphere that reflects the central fire), the five planets observables and the sphere of the fixed stars (that is, the celestial vault that includes the previous stars).

It contemplates a triad of substances: Limiting, Unlimited and Harmony. It can be seen in the following snippet:

"It is so with Nature and Harmony: The Being of Things is eternal, and Nature itself requires divine and nonhuman intelligence; in addition, it would be impossible for any existing thing to be even recognized by us if there was no basic Being of the things of which the universe is composed, that is, both the Limitant and the Unlimited. But since these Elements exist as different and unrelated, it would be clearly impossible for a universe to be created with them unless harmony [and] was added in what way this harmony came to exist. However, things that were similar and related did not need harmony; but things that were unlike, unrelated and unevenly arranged are necessarily bound by such harmony, through which they are destined to endure in the universe."

Work

Pythagoras and Filolao experimenting with musical flautas. De Theorica musicae de Franchino Gaffurio, 1492 (1480?)

Diogenes Laertius reproduces, without considering it authentic or false, the contemporary version that Philolaus would have been the author of a book entitled On Nature, which Plato would have bought from his descendants for a significant amount of silver (40 Alexandrian minas) or received from a Pythagorean disciple whom he would have helped when he was persecuted for justice, to later use the text as inspiration, source or copy template for his own work Timaeus.

In another passage Diogenes speaks of not one but three books. In this regard, the scholar Charles Peter Manson points out that the first book would have dealt with the Universe; the second on the nature of numbers, source of the essence of things according to Pythagorean ideas. Diogenes himself cites Demetrius of Magnesia, who in his work Colombroños would have pointed out that Philolaus was the first Pythagorean to publish the group's body of dogmas, under the sentence: "Nature in the The world is cohesively composed of finite and infinite, just like the universe and all that is contained in it".

The transmitted fragments of his work were collected and explained by August Boeckh in his work Philolaos des Pythagoreers Lehren, nebst den Bruchstücken seines Werkes (1819).

Eponymy

• The lunar crater Philolaus carries this name in his memory.