Abstract

Kierkegaard notwithstanding, Hegel's notion of the "good" and "bad" infinity was not unprecedented. On the contrary, this attempt to invest a "logical" category with ethical significances goes back to the very roots of the Western metaphysical tradition. In the Pythagorean doctrine of limit and the unlimited, limit was the arche of the good; the unlimited of evil. In the Pythagorean concept of number as an ens, limit and the unlimited attained ontological status. And since number constituted the determinate character of all things, the Pythagorean peras and apeiron was a logos doctrine, the rational principle of the universe. Thereby Pythagoreanism marked a great advance over the Ionian materialisms.