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PhilosophersPythagore de Samos

Pythagore de Samos

All is number.

PresocraticsVIe s. av. J.-C. GreeceMaster of a community of disciplesTaught the passing of souls from body to body (according to tradition)Mathematician according to legendKnown only through witnesses
Diogenes Laertius VIII 4-5 (from Heraclides of Pontus); Xenophanes, fr. 7

The soul passes from one body to another

What it claims

The soul survives the death of the body and passes into other bodies, including those of plants and animals.

Why

Pythagoras said he remembered his past lives, and one memory was reportedly checked: so the soul passes from body to body.

Valid with an implicit premise

No text by Pythagoras defends this idea. What we have are stories: according to Heraclides of Pontus (4th c. BC, about 150 years after him), quoted by Diogenes Laertius (c. 230 AD), Pythagoras said he had been Aethalides, then Euphorbus, then Hermotimus, then Pyrrhus, and remembered everything. A contemporary, Xenophanes (c. 500 BC), tells in verse, with "they say", how a man recognised a friend's soul in the voice of a beaten puppy; the verses give no name, it is Diogenes Laertius who says the man is Pythagoras. The story is legendary, and some readers see mockery in Xenophanes' verses. The argument below is the strongest form we can reconstruct from these stories: it is a reconstruction, not a line of reasoning Pythagoras wrote.

P1According to Heraclides of Pontus, Pythagoras said he remembered his earlier lives: Aethalides, Euphorbus, Hermotimus, Pyrrhus.
P2According to the same story, one of these memories was put to the test: Hermotimus, one of those lives, is said to have identified at Branchidae the shield Menelaus had dedicated to Apollo.
P3 · implicit premiseWhen someone remembers, precisely and verifiably, events lived by another body, it means the same soul has lived in both.
Therefore the soul survives the death of the body and passes into other bodies, including those of plants and animals.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a case where Pythagoras says he remembers, where a memory is tested successfully, and where nevertheless no soul passes from one body to another (for instance, the memory comes from a handed-down story).
With P3 the conclusion follows. Without it, nothing connects the memory to a soul that continues: the memory could come from elsewhere (a story learnt, an object recognised because one has seen it before). P3 is written nowhere: it is our implicit premise, added by charity, and it carries all the weight. Note also that the argument assumes P1 and P2 are true as facts: they reach us only through a legendary story.
Analogy. Someone enters an unfamiliar house and describes the back room without error. We may conclude he has lived there. But he may also have seen photos. A precise memory proves the same life only if other sources are ruled out.

Objections

2

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

C
Cebes (Plato's character, Phaedo) 380 BC · attacks the conclusion

Even granting that the soul existed before birth and can be reborn many times, nothing proves it is not worn out by these births and does not finally perish altogether in one of its deaths. Cebes compares the soul to a weaver who wears out many cloaks: he outlasts them all, but dies before the last one. Passing through several bodies does not prove passing through an unlimited number.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in -380, after the author's death (-490).
The debate goes on (our summary) Pythagoras cannot reply: Plato writes about a century after his death, and we have no text by him. In the Phaedo, Socrates answers Cebes with other arguments (about the Forms), which are not Pythagoras'. Note also that Cebes grants the conclusion as written here (the soul survives and passes into other bodies): he attacks only the idea of endless survival. He is himself linked to the Pythagorean Philolaus, and his doubts do not tell us what the Pythagoreans thought.
Aristotle 340 BC · attacks the conclusion

The "Pythagorean myths" speak as if any soul could enter any body. But each body has its own form, and each art or soul has its own tools. To say a human soul can pass into a dog is like saying the carpenter's art can pass into flutes.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in -340, after the author's death (-490).
The debate goes on (our summary) Pythagoras cannot reply: Aristotle writes about 150 years after his death, and targets "the Pythagorean myths" in general, not a text by him. A defender could say that in the reported stories the soul keeps memory from one body to another: identity lies in the soul and its memory, not in the body's form. Aristotle holds on the contrary that the soul is the form of a particular body.