Knowledge and Number in Early Pythagoreans

Antonín Šíma

The paper examines the use of the terms „cognition“ and „number“ in the extant fragments of the Pythagorean thinker Philolaus of Croton. On the basis of an analysis of the words used for „cognition“ the author seeks to determine what kind of cognitive activity is linked by Philolaus, in fr. B 4, to numbers, and what it is that is cognized by means of numbers. In the cited fragment, the object of cognition appears in the form of phenomena accessible to the senses and articulated by cognition in relationship to its environment, and in the broadest framweork, to the ordered whole of the world. Further, the paper examines the relevance of discovering the basic structure of articulating numbers into species and forms for the articulation of the objects of cognition and for the representation of the values that can be grasped by means of numbers for human cognition.