Customer Reviews

Theon of Smyrna: Mathematics Useful for Understanding Plato Or, Pythagorean Arithmatic, Music, Astronomy, Spiritual Disciplines (Secret doctrine reference series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great book for people interested in plato, pythagorianism, and the effects of pythogoras on the works of plato. It's probably less interesting for achademics because it's focused on a aspect of plato's work wich are not generally concidered to be of great importantce in achademic circels. This is unfortunate because this work, allong with a few others, clearly shows that to understand plato's meaning it is quite essential to be aware of the importance Plato placed on these mathmatical theories and how they relate to his philosophy. Anyway, beautifull book and a good, clear translation. I'd also recommend: T.Taylors 'the theoretical arithmatic of the pythagorians', Nicomachus of gerasa's 'introduction to arithmatic', 'the pythaogrian source book'(compilation), and most importantly E.McClain's "pythagorian Plato". This last book, propably the best book I've ever read, is much easier to understand after having read (and studied) theon. It's to bad the achademic word chose to ignore this aspect of greek philosophy, I think it would have greatly increased our understanding of ancient philosophy and the history of western thought in general. This is of course no reason not to persue the subject ourselves, so for those of you who are inclined to do so, this book is a great start. Obviously it's not easy reading and you can clearly see the translators trouble in translating some of the the mathmatical passages. It's a great book simply because it exists (in english). It is one of a handfull of books on this subject to have survived to our time and one of the very very few that someone as actually taken the trouble to translate. My thank to the translator and publisher for making it available to the (non-greek-speaking) public!