There is a concept that philosophy is the science of the unknown.
It illuminates the darkness of the obscure, reveals the content of the possible and points out the ways and boundaries of the unattainable.
Tradition attributes the invention of the term itself to Pythagoras of Samos.
Pythagoras saw himself not as the owner of truth, but only as a person striving for it as an unattainable ideal.
Therefore, Pythagoras claimed that he is not the embodiment of wisdom a sage (sophos), but only a lover of wisdom a lover of wisdom (philosopher).
But philosophy for Pythagoras was not just a mental wisdom, but also a special system of life rules.
The love of wisdom was to embrace not only the mind, but also the whole being of the philosopher, subjugating him to himself and making him an aristocrat of spirit and virtue.
So, the history of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans can be described only approximately.
Apparently, at the end of the 6th century.
under Pythagoras, the general theoretical content of Pythagorism, its religious, scientific and philosophical teachings were formed.
Pythagorism reaches its heyday at this time.
In the second half of the 5th century, the philosophical teaching of the Pythagoreans, freed from religious prohibitions, came to the fore.
At the end of the 5th - the first half of the 6th century, Pythagorism developed into Platonism and merged with it in the activities of the ancient Academy.
*II.
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: religious, scientific and philosophical teaching.
*  * 1. Creation of the organization "Pythagorean Union".
*  Pythagoras, the son of Mnesarchus, a Samoan, was born in 576 BC.
According to legend, he studied in Egypt, traveled a lot.
Around 532, hiding from the tyranny of Polycarp, he settled in Croton, where he quickly gained wide fame and created a religious, philosophical and political organization - the Pythagorean Union.
This union was aimed at the domination of the best in the religious, scientific, philosophical in short, “moral” sense.
Pythagoras tried to create an "aristocracy of the spirit" in the person of his students, who conducted state affairs so perfectly that it was truly an aristocracy, which means “the rule of the best”.
The popularity of Pythagoras in Croton is explained by the outstanding personal qualities of the philosopher, his ability to attract people.
But not only the strength of the personality and wisdom of Pythagoras, but also the high morality of the ideas and life principles preached by him, attracted like minded people to him.
It was the talent of a political orator and a religious preacher that brought Pythagoras success.
No wonder the word “Pythagoras "means" convincing with speech".
The ritual of initiation into the members of the Pythagorean brotherhood was surrounded by many mysteries, the disclosure of which was severely punished.
"When the younger ones came to him and wanted to live together," says Iamblichus, " he did not immediately give consent, but waited until he checked them and made his own judgment about them.”
But even after entering the order after a strict selection and a probationary period, newcomers could only listen to the teacher's voice from behind the curtain, and they were allowed to see him only after several years of purification by music and ascetic life.
However, this was not a severe Christian asceticism, mortifying the flesh.
Pythagorean asceticism for a novice was reduced, first of all, to a vow of silence.
"The first exercise of the sage," Apuleius testifies, " was for Pythagoras to completely humble his tongue and words, the very words that poets call volatile, to enclose, plucking feathers, behind a white wall of teeth.
In other words, this is what the rudiments of wisdom were reduced to: to learn to reflect, to forget how to chatter”"
* 2.
The moral principles and commandments of Pythagoras.
*  The moral principles preached by Pythagoras are still worthy of imitation today.
Every person should follow the rule: run away from every trick, cut off disease from the body, ignorance from the soul, luxury from the womb, turmoil from the city, quarrel from the family.
There are three things in the world that are worth striving for and should be achieved: first, beautiful and glorious, secondly, useful for life, and thirdly, giving pleasure.
But pleasure is not meant to be vulgar and deceptive, not satisfying our gluttony and voluptuousness with luxuries, but another, aimed at the beautiful, righteous and necessary for life.
The system of moral and ethical rules, bequeathed to his students by Pythagoras, was collected in the moral code of the Pythagoreans - "Golden Verses".
They were rewritten and supplemented throughout the millennial history.
In 1808, the rules were published in St. Petersburg, beginning with the words: Zoroaster was the legislator of the Persians.
Lycurgus was the legislator of the Spartans.
Solon was the legislator of the Athenians.
Numa was the lawgiver of the Romans.
Pythagoras is the lawgiver of the entire human race.
Here are some extracts from the book containing 325 Pythagorean commandments:
- Find yourself a faithful friend, having him, you can do without the gods.
- Young man!
If you want a long lasting life for yourself, then refrain from satiety and any excess.
- Young girls!
Remember that a face is only beautiful when it depicts an elegant soul.
- Do not chase happiness: it is always in yourself.
- Do not worry about gaining great knowledge: of all knowledge, moral science may be the most necessary, but it is not taught.
Today it is absolutely impossible to say which of the hundreds of similar commandments go back to Pythagoras himself.
But it is quite obvious that all of them express eternal universal values that remain relevant always as long as a person is alive.
* 3. The way of life of the Pythagoreans.
*  The Pythagoreans led a special way of life, they had their own special daily routine.
The Pythagoreans were supposed to start the day with verses:
Before you get up from the sweet dreams that are evoked at night,
Think, raskin, what things the day has prepared for you.
When they woke up, they did mnemonic exercises to help them remember the necessary information, and then went to the seashore to meet the sunrise, thought about the affairs of the upcoming day, after which they did gymnastics and had breakfast.
In the evening, there was a joint bathing, a walk, dinner, after which a libation to the gods and reading.
Before going to bed, everyone gave himself an account of the past day, ending with his poems:
Do not allow lazy sleep on tired eyes,
Before you canot answer three questions about the day's business:
What did I do?
What didnot you do?
What's left for me to do?
The Pythagoreans paid great attention to medicine and psychotherapy .
They developed techniques for improving mental abilities, the ability to listen and observe.
They developed memory, both mechanical and semantic.
The latter is possible only if the beginnings are found in the knowledge system.
As we can see, the Pythagoreans took care of both physical and spiritual development with equal zeal.
It was they who gave birth to the term "kalokagatia", which denoted the Greek ideal of a person who combines aesthetic (beautiful) and ethical (good) principles, harmony of physical and spiritual qualities.
Throughout the history of Ancient Hellas (Greece), kalokagatia remained a kind of cult for the ancient Greeks and passed from them to the ancient Romans.
The Pythagorean way of life was determined by the fact that there is no greater evil than anarchy (anarchy), that a person by nature cannot remain prosperous if no one is in charge.
The supreme power belongs to God.
This is their principle and the whole way of life is arranged in such a way as to follow God.
And the basis of this philosophy is that it is ridiculous to act like people who are looking for good somewhere else, and not from the Gods.
After the Gods, one should honor the rulers, parents and elders, as well as the law.
The way of life of the Pythagoreans included the doctrine of different ways of treating people depending on their status in society.
The meaning of this way of life is the subordination of a person to authority.
In the Pythagorean ideal, it is not difficult to see a flexible socio political concept adapted to the execution of the ruling groups of society.
Built on the authority of society and the law, it requires to adhere to the father's customs and laws, even if they are worse than others.
* 4. Religious and philosophical teaching.
*  In the religious and philosophical teaching of early Pythagorism, two parts are distinguished: "akusmata “(heard), i.e. the provisions presented orally and without proof by the teacher to the student, and” matemata" (knowledge, teaching, science), i.e. knowledge itself.
The provisions of the first type included indications of the meaning of things, the preference of certain things and actions.
They were usually taught in the form of questions and answers: What are the Islands of the blessed?
- The Sun and the Moon.
What is the fairest thing?
- Making Sacrifices.
What is the most beautiful thing?
- Harmony, etc.
The Pythagoreans had many symbolic sayings.
The collection of these sayings, called akusmas, replaced the charter of the society.
Here are some of the Pythagorean acusmas and their interpretations:
- Do not eat the heart (i.e., do not undermine the soul with passions or grief)
- Do not stir up fire with a knife (i.e. do not touch angry people)
- When leaving, do not look back (i.e., do not cling to life before death)
- Do not sit on a bread measure (i.e., do not live idly), etc.
There is an opinion that initially the Pythagorean acusmas were understood in the literal sense, and their interpretations were invented later.
For example, the first akusma reflected the general Pythagorean ban on animal food, especially since the heart is a symbol of all living things.
But in its initial form, this is pure magic: defense against witchcraft, such as smoothing and folding a bed, is necessary so that there are no body prints left on it, which could be affected by a sorcerer and, thereby, harm a person.
Or, for example, it was forbidden to touch beans, just like human meat.
According to one myth, the beans came from drops of blood torn apart by Dionysus and Zagreya, so they were forbidden to eat.
In general, all these stories only remind us once again that the Pythagoreans lived a very long time ago two and a half millennia ago, that a clear mind and high morality were shrouded in the consciousness of an ancient person with a beautiful fairy tale veil.
* 5. The scientific worldview of the Pythagoreans.
Cosmogony and cosmology.
*  As for his own knowledge, Pythagoras is credited with geometric discoveries, such as the well known Pythagorean theorem on the ratio of the hypotenuse and the legs of a right triangle, the doctrine of five regular bodies, in arithmetic the doctrine of even and odd numbers, the beginning of the geometric interpretation of a number, etc.
Pythagoras first used the word cosmos in its current sense to define the entire universe and its most important side orderliness, symmetry, and therefore beauty.
The Pythagoreans proceeded from their main thesis that " order and symmetry are beautiful and useful, and disorder and asymmetry are ugly and harmful."
But the beauty of the macrocosm - the Universe, the Pythagoreans believed, is revealed only to those who lead a correct, perfectly arranged way of life, i.e. who maintain order and beauty in their microcosm.
Consequently, the Pythagorean way of life had an excellent " cosmic goal – to transfer the harmony of the universe into the life of man himself.”
The cosmogony of the Pythagoreans can be described as follows: the world consisting of the limit and the infinite is a sphere that arises in the boundless void and “inhales” it into itself, thereby expanding and dismembering.
This is how the world space, celestial bodies, motion and time arise.
In the middle of the world is fire, the house of Zeus, the connection and measure of nature.
Next are the Counter Earth, the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the five planets and the world of fixed stars.
The counter earth was introduced for round counting, as the tenth celestial body, with its help lunar eclipses were explained.
The cosmic bodies originated from the central fire and revolve around it, attached to crystal spheres.
The planets, including the Earth, rotate from west to east, always facing the central fire with one side, so we do not see it.
Our hemisphere is warmed by the rays of the central fire reflected by the Sun.
The Pythagorean cosmology represents a significant step forward.
The rejection of geocentrism, the recognition of the spherical shape of the Earth, its daily rotation around the central fire, the explanation of solar eclipses by the passage of the Moon between the Sun and the Earth, and the seasons by the inclination of the Earth's orbit relative to the solar one, represented a significant approximation to the truth.
But the matter is not limited to this physical picture.
Pythagorism creates a certain logical scheme of the universe, correlated with a moral assessment.
This aspect of the matter is represented in the doctrine of opposites, which is represented as follows: limit and infinite, odd and even, one and many, male and female, resting and moving, light and dark, good and bad, quadrangular and versatile.
It's not just a matter of opposition - opposites are connected.
Speaking of Pythagoras as the founder of civic education, Iamblichus attributed to him the idea that none of the existing things is pure, everything is mixed, and fire with earth, and fire with water, and air with them, and they with air, and even the beautiful with the ugly, and the just with the unjust.
The next idea of the Pythagoreans is the idea of harmony.
Its origins can be sought, if not from Pythagoras himself, then from Alcmaeon of Croton, a representative of Pythagorean medicine.
This doctor considered everything that exists as a product of the union, mixing, harmonious fusion of opposites.
He believed that the balance of forces of wet, dry, cold, warm, bitter, sweet, etc., preserves health, and the dominance of one of them is the cause of the disease.
Health is a proportionate mixture of such forces.
This proportionate mixing was called “harmony” by the Pythagoreans, becoming one of the main concepts of their teaching: everything in the world is necessarily harmonious.
The gods are harmonious, the cosmos is harmonious, because all its constituent moments are absolutely coordinated into a single and indivisible whole.
The state and the tsar are harmonious, because the strength of binding all people into a single whole depends on it.
Alcmaeon's physiological guesses and discoveries are striking: he established that the organ of mental and mental processes is not the heart, as it was believed before him, but the brain, established the difference between the ability to perceive and the ability to think, which belongs only to man, and also proved that sensations are brought to the brain through special ways connecting the sense organs with the brain.
* 6. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls.
*  There was also a lot of mystical, vague and simply ridiculous in the teachings of Pythagoras, not only for our contemporaries, but also for the contemporaries of Pythagoras.
Among such doctrines was the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, of the posthumous transmigration of the human soul into animals, that “everything that is born again is born at intervals of time, that there is nothing new in the world and that all living things should be considered related to each other."
The Pythagoreans had specific ideas about the nature and fate of the soul.
The soul is a divine being, it is enclosed in the body as a punishment for sins.
The highest goal of life is to free the soul from the darkness of the body and prevent it from moving to another body.
To achieve this goal, it is necessary to fulfill the moral code of the”Pythagorean way of life".
From the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, there were also prescriptions prohibiting killing animals and eating their meat, since the soul of a deceased person could live in an animal.
Many very coolly accepted this part of the Pythagorean teaching and often ridiculed it and attributed it to foreign influence.
* 7. The philosophy of number.
*  The main philosophical orientation of Pythagoras was in the philosophy of number.
The numbers of the Pythagoreans at first did not differ at all from the things themselves and, therefore, were simply a numerical image.
At the same time, not only physical things were understood numerically, but also everything that exists in general, such as good or virtue.
Then they began to be interpreted as the essences, principles and causes of things.
The Pythagoreans, having devoted themselves to mathematical studies, considered numbers to be the beginnings of everything, since they found many similarities in numbers with what exists and happens, and in numbers the primary elements of all mathematical principles.
At first, the Pythagoreans form a purely concrete physical understanding of number: numbers are special extended things, from which objects of the sensory world are composed.
They are the beginning and element of everything that exists.
The logical basis of this representation is the geometric understanding of numbers: one is a point, two points define a straight line, three points define a plane.
Hence the ideas about triangles, squares, rectangles.
The triangle is the primary source of the birth and creation of various types of things.
The square carries the image of the divine nature, this figure symbolizes high dignity, because right angles betray integrity, and the number of sides is able to resist force.
Here we need to mention the main Pythagorean symbol - the Pythagorean star, which is formed by the diagonals of a regular pentagon.
Another circumstance is also striking.
It is the star shaped pentagon that is most common in living nature (remember the flowers of forget me nots, carnations, bluebells, cherries, apple trees, etc.) and is fundamentally not possible in the crystal lattices of inanimate nature.
Fifth order symmetry is called the symmetry of life.
This is a kind of protective mechanism of living nature against crystallization, against petrification, for the preservation of a living individuality.
And it is this geometric figure that the Pythagoreans choose as a symbol of health and life.
The Pythagorean star (pentagram) was a secret sign by which the Pythagoreans recognized each other.
Of the many numbers, the number is sacred“36” : 1 + 2 + 3 .
It consists of one, and without one there is not a single number and it symbolizes " one." - the unity of being and the world.
It consists of a deuce, which symbolizes the fundamental polarity in the universe: light, darkness, good, evil, etc.
It consists of a triple, the most perfect of numbers, because it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
In addition, amazing transformations are possible in the number “36", for example: 36 = 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8.
It can be concluded that the numbers of the Pythagorians are the fundamental universal objects, to which it was supposed to reduce not only mathematical constructions, but also the entire diversity of reality.
Physical, ethical, social and religious concepts have received a mathematical coloring.
The science of numbers is given a huge place in the system of worldview, i.e., in fact, mathematics is declared a philosophy.
The Pythagoreans attributed a special importance to numbers in the matter of knowledge.
According to Philolaus, " number is the basis of the formality and cognizability of everything that exists.
Everything that is known has a number.
For without it it is impossible to understand or know anything."
*III.
CONCLUSION.
The significance of the religious, scientific and philosophical teachings of the Pythagoreans.
*
The long and complex history of Pythagorism poses many questions to researchers.
However, it is possible to formulate the following fairly reasonable assessments of the meaning and theoretical content of the Pythagorean teachings.
The ideology of Pythagorism includes three main components: religious, mythological, magical; scientific, related to the development of mathematics; and philosophical.
The latter aspect demonstrates the desire to find the " beginning” of everything that exists and use it to explain the world, man and his place in the cosmos.
However, the leading material tendency is being replaced by an idealistic one, which was based on the most important discovery associated with the development of mathematical knowledge - the discovery of the possibility of identifying ordered and numerically expressible quantitative relations of everything that exists.
The numerical regularity of existence revealed by the Pythagoreans is the extended world of bodies, the mathematical regularities of the movement of celestial bodies, the laws of musical harmony, the law of the beautiful structure of the human body, etc. the discoveries appeared as a triumph of the human mind, which man owes to the deity.
Unfortunately, for a thousand years of ancient traditions, real and causing deep respect for the personality of Pythagoras, information was mixed with a lot of legends, fairy tales and tall tales.
Many miracles could be told about the philosopher Pythagoras.
But the main miracle that made him famous was that he led humanity out of the labyrinths of myth making and God seeking to the shores of the ocean of accurate knowledge.
The morning bathing of the Pythagoreans in the waves of the Ionian Sea was also a daily prelude to swimming on the ocean of knowledge.
Only the purpose of the voyage was not the search for treasure, but the search for truth.
Pythagoras was probably the first who revealed to mankind the power of abstract knowledge.
He showed that it is the mind, not the senses, that brings true knowledge to a person.
That is why he advised his students to move from the study of physical objects to the study of abstract mathematical objects.
Thus, mathematics becomes an instrument of knowledge of the world for Pythagoras.
And mathematics is followed by philosophy, because philosophy is nothing more than the dissemination of accumulated special (in this case, mathematical) knowledge to the field of worldview.
This is how the famous Pythagorean thesis is born: "Everything is a number".
Thus, mathematics and philosophy are born in the depths of the Pythagorean union.
They considered it possible to achieve purification and union with the deity with the help of mathematics.
Mathematics was one of the components of their religion.
"God is a unity, and the world is a multitude and consists of opposites.
What brings opposites to unity and connects everything into the cosmos is harmony.
Harmony is divine and consists in numerical relations.
Whoever studies this divine numerical harmony to the end will become divine and immortal himself."
Such was the Pythagorean union - the favorite brainchild of the great Hellenic sage.
Truly, it was a union of truth, goodness and beauty.
* IV.
LIST OF USED LITERATURE.
*  1. Asmus V. F. Ancient philosophy.
M. 1976.
2. Bogomolov A. S. Ancient Philosophy , Moscow, 1985.
3. Diogenes Laertius.
About the life, teachings and sayings of famous philosophers.
M. 1979.
4. Taranov P. S. 120 philosophers.
Simferopol, 1996.
5. Sokolov V. V. Ancient philosophy.
M. 1958.
6. Losev A. P.
The history of ancient aesthetics.
M. 1994.
7. Windelband V.
The history of ancient philosophy.
Kiev, 1995.
