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Pythagoras
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Pythagoras was born in on the island of Samos, in the Aegean Sea. Pythagoras's father was Mnesarchus and, while his mother was Pythais and she was a native of Samos. Mnesarchus was a merchant who came from Tyre, and there is a story that he brought corn to Samos at a time of famine and was granted citizenship of Samos as a mark of gratitude. As a child Pythagoras spent his early years in Samos but traveled widely with his father. There are accounts of Mnesarchus returning to Tyre with Pythagoras and that he was taught there by the Chaldaeans and the learned men of Syria. It seems that he ... visited Italy with his father.
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In the Pythagorean Memoirs, Pythagoras is said to have adopted the Monad and the Indefinite Dyad as incorporeal principles, from which arise first the numbers, then plane and solid figures and finally the bodies of the sensible world (Diogenes Laertius VIII. 25). This is the philosophical system that is most commonly ascribed to Pythagoras in the post-Aristotelian tradition, and it is found in Sextus Empiricus' (2nd century AD) detailed accounts of Pythagoreanism (e.g., M. X. 261) and most significantly in the influential handbook of the differing opinions of the Greek philosophers, which was compiled by Aetius in the first century AD and goes back to Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus (e.g., H. Diels, Doxographi Graeci I. 3.8). The testimony of Aristotle makes completely clear... that this was the philosophical system of Plato in his later years and not that of Pythagoras or even the later Pythagoreans. Aristotle is explicit that the indefinite dyad is unique to Plato (Metaphysics 987b26 ff.) and that the Pythagoreans recognized only the sensible world and hence did not derive it from immaterial principles. Although Theophrastus usually follows his teacher Aristotle quite closely in his reports of the views of the early Greek philosophers, in this case he appears to agree with the later tradition in ascribing late Platonic metaphysics to Pythagoras.
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