The cosmos according Philolaus

Philolaus, fifth century A.C physician and philosopher

Philolaus had the great merit of disseminating the concepts and principles of the philosophical Pythagorean doctrine.

For Philolaus there are four elements: fire, water, ground and air, changing and moving through it all. These elements constitute the Cosmos (animated, thinking, spherical), whose center is the earth (spherical, inhabited).
The four elements are equal in the cosmos:

- Light / dark
- Hot / cold
- Dry / Wet

When the heat is greater than the cold summer has, when the heat is less than the cold winter has. When hot and cold does not prevail on each other you have the spring, leading saute and autumn, which brings disease.

Aten the great Sun god

The pharaoh Ekhnaton and his family worshipping Aten

In the history of religions and philosophy, light is the simbol of positivity, in two different meanings: light as principle of life and knowledge.

In Ancient Egyptian religion, the sun is the light source. The pharaoh Ekhnaton places traditional gods under that of Aten (or Ra), the sun god.

The Great Hymn to the Aten suggests that Ekhnaton considers Aten as the only god and creator of the universe:

How manifold it is, what thou hast made!

They are hidden from the face (of man).

O sole god, like whom there is no other!

Thou didst create the world according to thy desire,

Whilst thou wert alone: All men, cattle, and wild beasts,

Whatever is on earth, going upon (its) feet,

And what is on high, flying with its wings.

[...]

"Light am I: ah, that I were night!"

"The night song", from "Thus spoke Zarathustra", written by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883-1885), talks about the meaning of life trought the opposition between light and dark, but in this poetry, dark means life and light means death.

"Light am I: ah, that I were night! But it is my lonesomeness to be begirt with light!

Ah, that I were dark and nightly! How would I suck at the breasts of light!

And you yourselves would I bless, ye twinkling starlets and glow-worms aloft!--and would rejoice in the gifts of your light".

Allegory of the Cave

In the seventh book from "The republic" (514 b - 520 a), Plato illustrates "our nature in its education and want of education", trought the Allegory of the Cave. This relates to the idea of forms as people struggle to see the reality beyond illusion.

After "returning from divine contemplations to human evils", a man "is graceless and looks quite ridiculous when – with his sight still dim and before he has gotten sufficiently accustomed to the surrounding darkness – he is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the representations of which they are the shadows, and to dispute about the way these things are understood by men who have never seen justice itself?" (517d-e)