Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)

Walter Burkert's 1962 study, later translated into English as Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, is the work generally credited with overturning the older popular image of Pythagoras as primarily a mathematician and establishing the now standard scholarly reading of him as a religious teacher whose circle mixed number symbolism, ritual purity and cosmology. Its track record is that this reading has held: it is the position later specialist treatments of Pythagoras still argue from or against, rather than one view among many with no particular standing. Its method rests on close philological work across the fragmentary and often late secondhand sources for early Pythagoreanism, which is also its limit, since firsthand Pythagorean writing barely survives and every reconstruction, including this one, is built from what later writers said about a much earlier figure. As with any single influential study now more than sixty years old, later scholarship has continued to refine points of detail, and a claim resting on the most current Pythagorean scholarship may need a newer source alongside it.