Abstract

This article aims to shed light on the reception of Aristotle’s theory of the continuum in late antique thought. It starts with a brief introduction to Aristotle’s theory and then moves on to analyze its reassessment in the philosophy of Pseudo-Archytas, a thinker whose significance for the development of Neopythagorean thought was unprecedented but whose theoretical heritage, as far as the theory of the continuum is concerned, has not yet been fully scrutinized. The main thesis of this article is that Pseudo-Archytas’s appropriation and creative reworking of Aristotle presents us with a fullfledged theory of the temporal continuum which at its core is a mathematical continuum. As such, this continuum is antithetical to that of Aristotle, as its key point is to substantiate the possibility of a continuum made of indivisibles (or, to use more up-to-date language, of infinitesimals) as a new philosophical orthodoxy.