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Bodily, material things are... continuously involved in continuous flo — Nicomachus

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"Bodily, material things are... continuously involved in continuous flow and change—in imitation of the nature and peculiar quality of that eternal matter and substance which has been from the beginning... The bodiless things, however, of which we conceive in connection with or together with matter, such as qualities, quantities, configurations, largeness, smallness, equality, relations, actualities, dispositions, places, times, all those things... whereby the qualities in each body are comprehended—all these are of themselves immovable and unchangeable, but accidentally they share in and partake of the affections of the body to which they belong. Now it is with such things that wisdom is particularly concerned, but accidentally also with... bodies."
Nicomachus
Nicomachus
Nicomachus
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Nicomachus of Gerasa was an Ancient Greek Neopythagorean philosopher from Gerasa, in the Arabia Petraea. He is perhaps Hellenized of Arab origin from Jerash. Like many Pythagoreans, Nicomachus wrote about the mystical properties of numbers, best known for his works Introduction to Arithmetic and Manual of Harmonics, which are an important resource on Ancient Greek mathematics and Ancient Greek mus

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"The ancients, who under the leadership of Pythagoras first made science systematic, defined philosophy as the love of wisdom... [Οἱ παλαιοὶ καὶ πρώτοι μεθοδεύσαντες ἐπιστήμην κατάρξαντος Πυθαγόρου ὡρίζοντο φιλοσοφίαν εἶναι φιλίαν σοφίας...] This wisdom he defined as the knowledge, or science, of the truth in real things, conceiving science to be a steadfast and firm apprehension of the underlying substance. and real things to be those which continue uniformly and the same in the universe and never depart even briefly from their existence; these real things would be things immaterial..."
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"And once more is this true in the case of music; not only because the absolute is prior to the relative, as great to greater and rich to richer and man to father, but also because the musical harmonies, diatessaron, diapente, and diapason, are named for numbers; similarly all of their harmonic ratios are arithmetical ones, for the diatessaron [] is the ratio of 4 : 3, the diapente [] that of 3 : 2, and the diapason [perfect ] the double ratio [2 : 1]; and the most perfect, the di-diapason [], is the quadruple ratio [4 : 1]."
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