David Sider and Dirk Obbink (eds.), Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras

Abstract

This splendid book has been worth the wait. The papers collected here (four on Pythagoras and eight on Heraclitus) were presented in 2005 at “a bicontinental conference” (as the editors call it) on Samos and in Kuşadaı, organized by Apostolos Pierris of the Institute for Philosophical Research.1 This rich mixture of essays by established international scholars nicely complements the collection from the 2012 Symposium Praesocraticum on Heraclitus published in this journal’s volume 3 issue 1 in 2015, and other recent books on Heraclitus or Pythagoras.2 In the opening essay, “Philosophy’s Numerical Turn: Why the Pythagoreans’ Interest in Numbers is Truly Awesome”, Catherine Rowett fearlessly takes on the problems of just what it was about numbers that interested early Pythagoreans (including the elusive Pythagoras himself) and why. Rowett argues that the pre-Platonic Pythagoreans, in exploring harmony theory and its ratios (which she sees also in pre-Philolaus Pythagoreanism), deserve as much philosophical credit for commitments to reason and to order as Anaximander (who posits a mysterious apeiron) and Heraclitus (who argues that everything happens in accordance with the logos, the fundamental principle(s) of order and rationality).3 That none of these theories turn out to be correct is irrelevant, for all share the fundamental Presocratic philosophical commitment to order and explanation, and to the beauty of the cosmos. What Rowett finds particularly important and worth admiration and celebration in the “Pythagorean turn” as it develops through early Pythagoreanism, Philolaus and Archytas, is its reliance on mathematical knowledge as a prerequisite to any other knowledge and its emerging view of number as incorporeal. Rowett argues that Pythagoreanism begins with a commitment to “the explanatory power of beauty, structure, form, and indeed teleology, in the universe”; thinking of it this way shows how the “idea of appealing