Ideas of Pythagoras and his school (including Philolaos) became known to the Islamic and to a lesser degree to the Jewish world since the end of the ninth century. Doxographical information about them can be found in Arabic translations of Aristotle, Plato, and above all two doxographical sources: the Placita philosophorum, which is attributed to Plutarch and is assumed to be compiled by Aetius Arabus (Daiber 1980), and a doxography that is attributed to Ammonius and is available only in an Arabic version (Rudolph 1989), much like the Arabic translation of the Placita apparently from the second half of the ninth century.

The impact of these sources, especially of Aetius, on Islamic thought (Rosenthal 1965, Daiber 1980), p. 337f.), on the Islamic philosopher al-Kindī, who died in 866 (Baffioni 1985), on the anonymous encyclopaedia of the Sincere Brethren from the tenth century (Netton 1991), and on the Jewish philosopher...