VISION OF WOMEN IN CONTEXT APPEARANCES AND FUNCTIONING OF THE PYPHAGORIAN SCHOOL
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/sophia.2020.16.11Keywords:
Pythagorean women, ancient women philosophers, Pythagorean school, Pythagoras, early ancient Greek philosophy, pseudoepigraphic worksAbstract
The article, based on classical ancient sources and the most modern fundamental scientific works, explores and reveals the specifics of the existence of women in the early Greek philosophical school, founded by Pythagoras.
There are three key reasons that led to the full existence of women along with men in the Pythagorean tradition: socio-political, doctrinal and vital. Accordingly, such a high status of women for the Pythagoreans is due not only to certain socio-political conditions of Greater Greece, or rather even the city of Croton, but also to the fact that the founder of this school, Pythagoras, unlike other early Greek thinkers, received philosophical knowledge from a woman, the Delphic Pythia Themistoclea.
The doctrinal reason has been shown to be that Pythagoras himself preached the equality of women. If he had preached the opposite of the socio-political role of women in a given geographical region, he would not only not have been accepted, but even expelled.
It is substantiated that the presence of women in this philosophical tradition is not a late Hellenistic fiction, but a real fact, based on the available sources of Aristotle's disciples – Dicaearchus and Aristoxenus, which testify to a rather ramified system of attracting women to the functioning of Pythagoreanism
The proposed author's dichotomy of the representatives of this philosophical school known to us: pseudo-epigraphic and agraphic. Accordingly, the agraphic ones are known to us only by mentioning in certain ancient sources, while we know about the pseudo-epigraphic ones not only the names, but also preserved works and letters that are attributed to the Pythagorean thinkers.
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