Rel 342: Final Paper

This is the longest research paper I've written so far: Plato's Pythagorean Influences

It's the final for my for my Rel 342 Origins of Western Morality? class.
( Rel 153 class final)
Sadly, the semester and class have ended. The class was great and I really enjoyed working on the paper. I am sad that I probably won't follow through as well as I want to with continued research and revising.

The paper was turned in a bit last minute, so I'm not entirely proud of how it looks. There were some embarrassing typos... probably still are.
I didn't want to copy 20 pages here, so I posted it with Google Documents, which I find hardly tolerable to look at.

What I'm saying is I guess I'll understand if you don't read it all ;)

But if you ever wondered where Plato got his ideas from,
it was the Pythagoreans.
They are really cool. They were there at the beginning of the big ideas of what philosophy was, the principle of order of the kosmos, inhalation of pneuma into the kosmos, the desire to be no longer merely mortal, but unite into the order of the kosmos...
And, reading about them from W.K.C. Guthrie is rather enjoyable.

I really admire the early Greek/Italian philosophers.
You read about them and you can just feel how strongly they wanted to know what it meant to live well. I respect philosophy like that.