What Do You Know About Pythagoras And Heraclites?

Pythagoras: (500-580 B.C.) Pythagoras was the most influential and celebrated of the earliest philosophers of ancient Greece. He is said to have founded the Pythagorean brotherhood, which gradually spread too many cities of the Greek empire of those days. It was an ethical, religious and political organization; whole motto was "First to hear, then to know". The members of the brotherhood used to live as members of a large family; eat and wear a similar type of dress. Their field of study included music, medicine and especially mathematics. The brotherhood soon clashed with the authorities and was persecuted.

He was the founder of the "Theory of Numbers". He ascribed the ultimate reality to right number and not gross and material. Rather its nature is harmony, proportion and number, which are to be appreciated by the cultivation of good taste, listening to music, and contemplation about the "similarity" and "relations" in the qualities of material objects, in terms of arithmetic, geometry and other branches of mathematic. Thus "number is the essence of all things." Hence true number is the ultimate reality.

Heraclites: (475-535 B.C.) He belonged to an aristocratic family. He despised democracy. He is called "Heraclites the obscure," because it is not easy to understand his writings. He is also known as "the weeping philosopher," because of his pessimistic outlook of life. He was a self-taught person. He ascribed the ultimate reality to fire. According to him, fire represents the principle of changes in this universe. Two of his noted sayings are as:

1- "War is the father of all, and the king of all."
2- "You cannot step twice into the same river, for fresh waters continue flowing upon you."

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Ancient Greece produced many great men, and one of the most interesting of them was a man called Pythagoras, who lived iri the sixth century B.C.Pythagoras was a religious teacher, a mathematician, and a philosopher. But because of his ideas and beliefs, he had to leave Greece and settle in Southern Italy.

What were some of those unusual beliefs he had? Pythagoras believed in immortality and the "transmigration of the soul". This meant that after death, any soul which did not go to heaven then occupied the body of another man, or even an animal. Because he believed this, he prohibited his followers from eating or sacrificing animals.

The followers of Pythagoras were called "Pythagoreans", and they observed many other strict rules of conduct. For instance, they had to observe silence and they could drink no wine.

Of course, we may think that some of his ideas were rather foolish, but Pythagoras also made many important contributions to knowledge. tie discovered that the length of a musical! String is in exact numerical relation to the pitch of its tone. From this he developed a theory of harmony and the belief that number was the first principle of the whole universe.

Pythagoreans also had a theory of the solar system which was nearly correct. They believed the earth was a sphere revolving around a central fire. Pythagoras also taught the theorem that "the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the square of the other two sides"

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