Discusses the importance of the early history of Greek mathematics to education and civic life through a study of the Parthenon and dialogues of Plato.
The Parthenon and Liberal Education seeks to restore the study of mathematics to its original place of prominence in the liberal arts. To build this case, Geoff Lehman and Michael Weinman turn to Philolaus, a near contemporary of Socrates. The authors demonstrate the influence of his work involving number theory, astronomy, and harmonics on Plato’s Republic and Timaeus, and outline its resonance with the program of study in the early Academy and with the architecture of the Parthenon. Lehman and Weinman argue that the Parthenon can be seen as the foremost embodiment of the practical working through of mathematical knowledge in its time, serving as a mediator between the early reception of Ancient Near-Eastern mathematical ideas and their integration into Greek thought as a form of liberal education, as the latter came to be defined by Plato and his followers. With its Doric architecture characterized by symmetria (commensurability) and harmonia (harmony; joining together), concepts explored contemporaneously by Philolaus, the Parthenon engages dialectical thought in ways that are of enduring relevance for the project of liberal education.
Table des matières
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Thinking the Parthenon and Liberal Arts Education Together
Part I. Plato on Dialectic and the Problem-Based Study of Mathematics
1. Dialectic and the Mathematical Arts in Republic (9.587b–588a): Philolaus’s Scale and the Final Bout between the Just and Unjust Souls
2. Dialectic and the Mathematical Arts in Timaeus (35b–36c): Philolaus’s Scale in the Construction of the World-Soul
3. Platonic Dialectic, Pythagorean Harmonics, and Liberal Arts Education
Part II. Harmonia and Symmetria of the Parthenon
4. The Parthenon and the Musical Scale
5. The Corner Problem
6. Refinements and the Question of Dialectic
Afterword
Appendix A
Pythagorean Musical Ratios
Appendix B
Principal Measurements of the Parthenon
Appendix C
Elements of the Doric Order
Appendix D
Ground Plan of the Parthenon
Appendix E
Glossary of Technical Terms
Notes
Works Cited
Index
A propos de l’auteur
Geoff Lehman is on the faculty of Art History at Bard College Berlin. Michael Weinman is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin and the author of Language, Time, and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves: The Subject in Empire’s Shadow and Pleasure in Aristotle’s Ethics.
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