The World as a Harmony

In line with the growing recognition of fifth century Pythagoreans as the main developers of a Pythagorean philosophy, the article offers a reconstruction of Philolaus’ metaphysical framework, arguing for its potential explanatory power and anticipating some key notions in ancient metaphysics. Starting from the scala naturae in B13, I reconstruct Philolaus’ overall metaphysical framework from his fragments, exploring how it might have worked when applied to micro-macrocosmic ontology. Key to this reconstruction is musical harmony. It is shown how, by using musical harmony as a paradigm and making explicit its mathematical structure, Philolaus (a) possessed a rather sophisticated explanatory framework, capable of accounting for the complex structure of the cosmos and of living beings; and (b) began to grasp the importance of a normative, abstract, structural principles working at a different metaphysical level from the constituents of things, thus anticipating Aristotle’s distinction between material and formal causes.