The starry heavens and the moral law: An outline of the history of a Pythagorean idea

Abstract

In this article, we show that it is possible to put the point of divergence of ethics to the time of the early Pythagorean school. The analysis of the specifi c amalgamation of monism and the ontological and epistemological dualism of the early Pythagoreans and Eleatics shows that European thought inherited from these schools а philosophical foundation of interrelationship between cosmology and ethics together with a tangle of unresolved problems. These problems are visible in the fi rst appearances of philosophical reactions to four key existentialistepistemological phenomena: the twoness, the angst, the dirtiness, and the error. We follow the traces of this heritage, systematised by Plato and Aristotle, through examples from the teachings of Galileo, Kepler, Agrippa, Descartes and Bacon, Kant’s schematism and categorical imperative, Vernadsky’s noosphere, and Nass’ deep ecology and his quest for a “non-Galilean” ontology.