Aither is a double-blind peer review, Open Access online academic journal. It is indexed at ERIH+ and Scopus. It is published by the Faculty of Arts of the Palacký University in Olomouc in cooperation with the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It comes out twice a year. Every second issue is international and contains foreign-language articles (mainly in English, but also in German and French). The journal is registered under the number ISSN 1803-7860.

Aither 14/2015:118-139 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2015.018

Rithmomachia - the Battle of Numbers, i.e. the Arithmetical Game of Philosophers

Marek Otisk
Filozofická fakulta, Ostravská univerzita v Ostravě
Filosofický ústav AV ČR

This paper deals with the philosopher's game called rithmomachia, i.e. the battle of the numbers. The beginnings of the playing of this game we can find around the year 1000 AD, the oldest texts are dated to the first half of the 11th century. The aim of this paper is the description of selected rules of this game according to the oldest texts about rithmomachy (written between ca. 1030 and ca. 1130). This article mainly wants to focus on the correlation between those rules and the subject of interest of the medieval intellectuals in the field of arithmetic (especially in the context of Boethius's Introduction to Arithmetic).

Published: September 30, 2015  Show citation

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Otisk, M. (2015). Rithmomachia - the Battle of Numbers, i.e. the Arithmetical Game of Philosophers. Aither, 7(14), 118-139. doi: 10.5507/aither.2015.018
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