Samos & Croton, c. 570–495 BCE
Pythagoras
Greek philosopher and mathematician whose followers saw number and harmony as the hidden order of the cosmos. Much of his life survives only as legend.
Where Pythagoras lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
You have started measuring something you used to simply do.
You are letting measurement reveal a pattern that feeling alone would miss. The risk is optimising the measure until it stops describing the thing.
Reading Pythagoras today
Pythagoras wrote in c. 570–495 BCE, from Samos & Croton — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Pythagoras is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The app draws on the wider tradition Pythagoras belongs to.
Working at roughly the same time
- Confucius — China, 551–479 BCE
- Heraclitus — Ephesus, c. 535–475 BCE
- Plato — Athens, c. 428–348 BCE
- Protagoras — Greece, c. 490–420 BCE
- Socrates — Athens, c. 470–399 BCE
Argues the same cases
Jeremy Bentham, Zhuangzi, Henry David Thoreau, Aristotle, William James take positions on the same dilemmas as Pythagoras, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.