Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography/Volume 3/Philolaus
PHILOLAUS, the earliest expositor of the Pythagorean philosophy of whom we have any knowledge, was born either at Crotona or at Tarentum in Southern Italy. The dates of his birth and death are uncertain, but he was a contemporary of Socrates, 409-399 b.c., although somewhat younger than the Athenian sage. Plato is said to have availed himself of the researches of Philolaus, more particularly in his dialogue entitled Timæus. All that we possess of his writings are a few fragments, which have been collected and carefully edited by the German scholar, Augustus Boeckh. According to the Pythagorean philosophy generally, as represented by Aristotle, number is the principle and essence of all things, a position which when properly explained is neither untrue nor unintelligible.—(See Pythagoras.) Philolaus expresses the principle somewhat differently. The elements of all things, he says, are "the limiting and the unlimited," and out of these "the limited," i.e., the universe, is generated. The world (κοσμος) cannot be explained by the single element of limitation, for limits require something to which they are applied, nor can it be explained by the single element of the unlimited, for the unlimited is the chaotic and inconceivable. But let these two principles combine, let limits be imposed upon the unlimited, and the ordered universe is the result. It is obvious that if we suppose things to be thus constituted, we must regard them as originally unlimited, for it would be altogether futile to suppose limits induced upon what was already limited. Plato, in his dialogue entitled Philebus, afterwards adopted and applied to moral purposes this Pythagorean doctrine of the limiting and the unlimited. The doctrine is important in the history of speculation as an early expression of that fertile truth which is the basis of all sound philosophy, and which Hegel has done more than any other philosopher to signalize; the truth, namely, that the universe and everything which it contains is a unity of contraries—in other words, that absolute oneness (unity without diversity) is altogether inconceivable and absurd.—J. F. F.