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It is a commonplace among scholars that the early Pythagoreans posited an immortal soul. The earliest source to associate immortality of the soul to the Pythagoreans unequivocally, Dicaearchus of Messana, stipulates that they held that (a) the soul is immortal; (b) it changes into other kinds of animals; (c) there is eternal recurrence; and (d) embodied animate creatures are of the same genus. A problem with Dicaearchus' account is that each of these doctrines can also be found in the dialogues of Plato. Given Dicaearchus' penchant for conflating Platonic with Pythagorean philosophy, we cannot employ this account for a historical understanding of Pythagorean psychology in a straightforward way. This chapter instead investigates Pythagorean psychology through analysis of two passages of Aristotle’s De anima that are often not brought to bear on the question. One passage draws important comparisons between the psychology of the Pythagoreans and Democritean and Ecphantic atomism, suggesting that the early Pythagoreans held a material theory of soul; by reference to arguments similar to Cebes' in Plato's Phaedo (87b-e), the other explains how a transmigratory soul could nevertheless be mortal. The early Pythagoreans are thus likely to have held that the soul is material, mortal, and transmigratory.
The Peripatetic view of Pythagoras mirrors the split in the tradition that was present in the earliest sources: Aristoxenus of Tarentum follow Empedocles in being overwhelmingly positive, whereas Dicaearchus and Hieronymus are heirs to Heraclitus' bitter critique. In terms of amount of material, the Peripatetics put greatest emphasis on the way of life of Pythagoras and later Pythagoreans. Theophrastus succeeded Aristotle as head of the Lyceum in 322 and remained until 287. He certainly referred to the Pythagoreans in his contribution to the Peripatetic survey of human knowledge, the Physical Opinions, which systematically collected early Greek views about the natural world. A text about the Pythagoreans in the later tradition can, with more or less plausibility, be traced back to Eudemus. Dicaearchus, writing at the same time as Theophrastus, Eudemus and Meno, focuses not on Pythagorean contributions to the sciences but rather on the life of Pythagoras himself.
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