Philolaus Quotes on Knowledge
Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 – c. 385 BCE), the first Pythagorean philosopher whose surviving fragments are extensive enough to permit a reasoned reconstruction of his views, gave the Pythagorean tradition its most distinctive epistemological doctrine: the cognition of the structure of the cosmos depends on grasping the numerical proportions through which the manifest world is intelligibly ordered. The fragments develop the doctrine that all things have number and that without number nothing can be known, and the corresponding astronomical system — with the Earth, the counter-Earth, the planets, and the heavens revolving around a Central Fire — supplies the earliest extant non-geocentric cosmological model in the Greek tradition.
Quotes
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Attributed to Philolaus:
“All things which can be known have number; for it is not possible that without number anything can be either conceived or known.”
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Attributed to Philolaus:
“Without number, nothing could be distinguished or thought.”
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“Fragment 2. All things, at least those we know, contain number ; for it is evident that nothing whatever can either be thought or known, without number. Number has two distinct kinds: the odd, and the even, and a third, derived from a mingling of the other two kinds, the even-odd. Each of its subspecies is susceptible of many very numerous varieties; which each manifests individually.”
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“Fragment 3. The harmony is generally the result of contraries; for it is the unity of multiplicity, and the agreement of discordances . (Nicom.Arith.2:509).”
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