Could There Be Method Behind Kepler’s Cosmic Music?

While Kepler is regarded as a major figure in standard historical accounts of the scientific revolution of early modern Europe, he is typically seen as having one foot in the new scientific culture and one in the old. In some of his work, Kepler appears, along with Galileo, to be on a trajectory towards Newton’s celestial mechanics. In addition to his advocacy of Copernicus’s heliocentrism, he appealed to physical causes in his explanations of the movements of celestial bodies. But other work appears to express a neo-Platonic “metaphysics” or “mysticism”, as most obvious in his embrace of the ancient tradition of the “music of the spheres”. Here I problematize this distinction. The musical features of Kepler’s purported neo-Platonic “metaphysics”, I argue, was also tied to Platonic and neo-Platonic features of the methodology of a tradition of mathematical astronomy that would remain largely untouched by his shift to heliocentrism and that would be essential to his actual scientific practice. Importantly, certain features of the geometric practices he inherited—ones later formalized as “projective geometry”—would also carry those “harmonic” structures expressed in the thesis of the music of the spheres.