Ethical and Legal Views of Pythagoras

Abstract

The article on the ethical and legal views of Pythagoras contains information about the universal system of knowledge created by the ancient Greek philosopher, thinker and sage Pythagoras, and the place in it of ideas and theories relating to ethics and law. Pythagoras was never just a scholastic theorist. His ideas, including ethical and legal, were put into practice by the thinker himself and his students and followers. The ideas of justice and universal love are of great ideological and practical importance. The meaning of the concept of justice changed both thousands of years before Pythagoras and thousands of years after him. Todayʼs understanding of justice is based largely on the definition given in antiquity. Todayʼs authors refer to Plato, who considered justice to virtue, to Aristotle, who associated justice with merit before society, but do not refer to Pythagoras, who two centuries before these philosophers gave the definition of justice as retribution for equal. Based on a general understanding of justice, Pythagoras discovered a new form of it ‒ legislative, which is even better than judicial justice. The purpose of this study is to try to trace the origins of the philosophical and theoretical foundations of European law. The methodological basis of the study is a polymethodological «horizontal» approach. The presented material represents a scientific novelty, as the issues analyzed by the authors have not been studied in Ukraine for three decades. It can be concussed that both theorists and practitioners should recall the ethical and legal views of Pythagoras, who in his universal system of knowledge did not separate ethics from law or law.

Keywords: justice; law; ethics; law; retaliatory justice; love-harmony.