Aristoxene

See also: Tarente (homonymy)

Aristoxène of Tarente (fourth century BC) is a Greek philosopher peripatetician, and theorist of the music and rate/rhythm.

He was educated by his father Spinthare, a pupil of Socrate, and later by the pythagoricians, Lamprus d' Erythrée and Xénophile, of which he learned the theory from the music. Later, he studied near Aristote with Athens, and it is said that he was very opposed when Théophraste was named with the head of the College with died of Aristote.

Its writings, which would have been four hundred fifty-three, were in the style of Aristote, and treated Philosophie, of ethical and music. The tendency to the empiricism of its thought appears in its theory that the heart is connected to the body as the harmony with the elements of an musical instrument. We do not know by which reasoning it could build this theory.

In music, it supported that the notes of the range were to be judged, not by a mathematical report/ratio, as the pythagoricians claimed it, but by the ear. The only one of its works which reached us is consisted of the three books of the Traité of harmonic , an incomplete treaty of music. The papyrus of Oxyrhynque of Grenfell and Hunt (vol. I., 1898) contains a fragment of five columns of a treaty to the measure. It is probably about the treaty of Aristoxène.

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