The Impact of Pythagoras, Socrates and Zeno of Elea

Pythagoras, a Greek, very influential philosopher back then but also nowadays. He was a mathematician and he founded the much known Pythagoras theory, but he is mostly known for his significance in numbers, he contributed in the developing of mathematics we know today. None of his works have survived unfortunately and back then it was not that easy to write and present your work, Pythagoras had to demonstrate his theorem using a stick in the sand. Another one of his works is the theory that all numbers are the key of understanding the world.

Actually a theory goes around that some of his work was made up from his admirers after his death, but it hasn’t been confirmed yet. He was the first one to start making books and theories surrounding numbers and mathematics, even though Plato and Aristotle continued after him making a great name of themselves, but Pythagoras lived long before them.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher who influenced the modern philosophy in ways no other philosopher did.

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He was so known in Ancient Greece that people often talked about him in plays and was the target of many writers. Although he e anything of his own he impacted philosophy by his way of life and his way of doing things, some of his most notable studies are the study of the soul and the study of the universe. Xenophon is the work that talks about Socrates life and what kind of person he was, in the beginning it is said that he was a man of self mastery and had argumentative skills.

Xenophon was like a formation of all his conversations that led his admirers to believe and live by the ideas Socrates gave. Socrates was sentenced to death by poisoning because he was hated in Athens and because according to sources he liked to humiliate people by making them appear as foolish. He was a critic of democracy which was loved by Athenians at the time, and he decided to go to trial rather than save himself, he gave a speech where he tried to defend himself and said the famous saying “the unexamined life is not worth living” which in his speech was refused and he died by getting poisoned.

Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher and mathematician who was widely known as the inventor of dialectic. He is known for his paradoxes that transformed mathematics. Zeno made use of three main premises the first one was that every unit has magnitude and he argued that if it is added or subtracted it does not increase or decrease, the second indicated that it is also infiently divisible and the third that it is invisible. He was arguing against one of his rivals which was Pythagoras. Pythagoras believed that numbers are extended units. Every mathematician at the time was having a hard time and has been contemplating the meaning of everything, but by doing that is how they got their results which we use freely today. Zeno’s statements of motion go by names given from Aristotle who studied and went over his paradoxes, today we know them as the Achilles paradox’s which proves that the slower mover will never be passed by the swifter race. It is proving that an object never really reaches the end. Zeno made some very controversial statements that to some his conclusions seem absurd and not very easily understood.

The philosophers I chose are all linked to each other in ways that I will now go over, Pythagoras and Zeno are both mathematicians who had a very hard time understanding their own thoughts, both of them not very known during their time but bloomed far after their death. Socrates was long after both of them and he is actually the most known and the most influential to philosophy since he had no impact in mathematics. Socrates gave philosophy some controversial ideas and quotes that truly shape modern philosophy nowadays, one of his greatest quotes is “One thing I know is that I know nothing” I understand this as he was very humble and accepting of the fact that he did actually not understand but yet he tried. Philosophy nowadays wouldn’t be the same without these three philosophers.