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CONTENTS

Plato was the ruin of philosophy, or so some modern thinkers would have us believe. According to both Nietzsche and Heidegger, philosophy never recovered from the attentions of Socrates and Plato in the fifth century B. C. Philosophy had been under way less than two hundred years, and in many ways it had scarcely started. But this was where seemingly it went wrong.

Socrates wrote nothing down. Our main knowledge of him is the quasi-historical character who appears in the dialogues of Plato. It is often difficult to know when this character is putting forward the ideas expressed by the actual Socrates, or simply acting as a mouthpiecefor Plato’s ideas. Either way, this figure differed radically from the philosophers who had preceded him (now generally known as the Pre-Socratics).

So how did Socrates and Plato ruin philosophy before it had properly started? Apparently they made the mistake of treating it as a rational pursuit. The introduction of analysis and cogent argument spoiled the whole thing.

But what was this precious Pre-Socratic tradition that was destroyed by the introduction of reason? The Pre-Socratic philosophers included a number of brilliant oddballs who asked all kinds of profound questions. ‘What is reality?’ ‘What is existence?’ ‘What is being?’ Many of these questions remain unanswered by philosophers to this day (and this includes those modern philosophers who refuse to play the game by claiming that such questions can’t be asked in the first place).

By far the most interesting (and most odd) of the Pre-Socratics was Pythagoras. Today Pythagoras is best remembered for his theorem that equates the squares of the sides of a right-angle triangle to the square of its hypotenuse.

Pythagoras was more than just a philosopher. He also managed to combine the roles of religious leader, mathematician, mystic, and dietary adviser. This taxing intellectual feat was to leave its mark on his philosophical ideas.

Pythagoras was born on Samos around 580 B. C. but he fled the local tyranny to set up his religious-philosophical-mathematical-dietary school at the Greek colony of Crotone in southern Italy. Here he issued a long list of rules to his pupil-disciple-mystic-gourmets. Among other prohibitions, they were expressly forbidden to eat beans or heart, to break first into a loaf of bread, or to let swallows nest in their roofs – and under no circumstances was one of them to eat his own dog. According to Aristotle, Pythagoras also found time to perform a few miracles, though uncharacteristically Aristotle gives no details of them. In the view of Bertrand Russell, Pythagoras was ‘a combination of Einstein and Mrs. Eddy’ (the founder of Christian Science).