Kosmiotes

Searching for info on the Pythagoreans in History of Greek Philosophy by Guthrie, I found the following, which Guthrie was using as a modern (physics-motivated) example of the way that the Pythagoreans may have dealt with finding confirmation in nature of numerical systems and ratios.




"The ideal element in nature consists in the fact that mathematical laws, which are laws of our own thought, really hold in nature. And that deep amazement which we often feel over the inner order of nature is connected above all with the circumstance that, as in the case of crystals, we have already recognized the effects of this 'mathematics of nature' long before our own mathematical knowledge was sufficiently developed to understand it's necessity."
-CF von Weizsackes, The World-View of Physics, 21











Yet I am reminded of the Intellectualist Fallacy in our Linguistics reading from Foley about how just because a set of rules describes a system, doesn't mean that these are the particular rules which guide the system.






and then there's just stuff like this.