Process and Reality, Whitehead’s magnum opus, is one of the major philosophical works of the modern world, and an extensive body of secondary literature has developed around it. Yet surely no significant philosophical book has appeared in the last two centuries in nearly so deplorable a condition as has this one, with its many hundreds of errors and with over three hundred discrepancies between the American and the English editions, which appeared in different formats with divergent paginations. The work itself (...) is highly technical and far from easy to understand, and in many passages the errors in those editions were such as to compound the difficulties. The need for a corrected edition has been keenly felt for many decades. (shrink)

Through criticism and analysis of ancient traditions, Kahn reconstructs the pattern of Anaximander’s thought using historical methods akin to the reconstructive techniques of comparative linguists.

This work focuses on the conception of God of the medieval Jewish philosopher and legal scholar, Hasdai Crescas (1340-1410/11). It demonstrates that Crescas’ God is infinitely creative and good and explores the parallel that Crescas implicitly draws between God as creator and legislator.

Most of the works on creation theology in the past have departed from a functional point of view with the assumption that creation is for the sake of human use, thus a means to an end. It has been believed that this utilitarian perception is supported by the sacred texts of theistic religions, saying that people were masters and possessors of the natural world. They were created in the likeness of God, ‘in His image’, and the rest of creation existed (...) solely for human benefit, to serve a human need. If there is an issue regarding the protection of the environment, it is behind the logic of convenience. Thus, eco-theology aims to be a practical ethic controlling and shaping human behaviour towards the natural environment. This article discusses a different approach to nature that is not a utilitarian point of view, but mystical, which regards creation as self-disclosure of God, so that each has its intrinsic meaning for itself and there is genuine and deep respect for the integrity of creation.Contribution: This article gives an alternative approach to the issue on environment in the study of eco-theology. The approach is an Islamic mystical approach. It also promotes inter-religious studies on the subject and demonstrates the textual studies within Christian and Islamic traditions, and beyond. (shrink)

We provide a philosophical reconstruction and analysis of the debate on the scientific status of cosmic inflation that has played out in recent years. In a series of critical papers, Ijjas et al. have questioned the scientificality of the current views on cosmic inflation. Proponents of cosmic inflation have in turn defended the scientific credentials of their approach. We argue that, while this defense, narrowly construed, is successful against Ijjas et al., the latter's reasoning does point to a significant epistemic (...) issue that arises with respect to inflation. A broadening of the concept of theory assessment is needed to address that issue in an adequate way. (shrink)

Wolff’s relation to Leibniz and Kant’s relation to both are notoriously vexed questions. First, this paper argues that Wolff’s most serious departure from Leibniz consists in his (so far overlooked) rejection of the latter’s infinitism. Second, it contends that the controversies that surrounded Wolff’s early acceptance of infinite causal regress and prompted his conversion to finitism played a prominent role in shaping the theses of Kant’s Antinomies. Whereas Leibniz and the early Wolff considered infinite regress to provide support for the (...) contingency of the world and the existence of God, Wolff’s enemies condemned it as Spinozistic. After Wolff, the claim that an infinite chain of causes is impossible became the standard view among both Wolffian and anti-Wolffian metaphysicians. (shrink)

Introduction THE FACES OF GOD How many faces has God? Egyptologists have wrestled with the problem over many years ...

This book is a sequel to Heaven and Earth in Ancient Greek Cosmology. With the help of many pictures, the reader is introduced into the way of thinking of ancient believers in a flat earth. The first part offers new interpretations of several Presocratic cosmologists and a critical discussion of Aristotle’s proofs that the earth is spherical. The second part explains and discusses the ancient Chinese system called gai tian. The last chapter shows that, inadvertently, ancient arguments and ideas (...) return in the curious modern flat earth cosmologies. (shrink)

Aristotle is traditionally read as dividing animal souls into three parts, while dividing human souls into four parts (a rational part, with theoretical and pr...

I present a recent historical case from cosmology—the story of inflationary cosmology—and on its basis argue that solving explanatory problems is a reliable method for making progress in science. In particular, I claim that the success of inflationary theory at solving its predecessor’s explanatory problems justified the theory epistemically, even in advance of the development of novel predictions from the theory and the later confirmation of those predictions.

Recent developments in astrophysical cosmology have revived support for the design argument among a growing clique of astrophysicists. I show that the scientific/mathematical evidence cited in support of intelligent design of the universe is infected with a mathematical sharp practice: the concepts of two numbers being of the same order of magnitude, and of being within an order of each other, have been stretched from their proper meanings so as to doctor the numbers evidentially. This practice started with A. (...) S. Eddington and P. A. M. Dirac in the 1920s and 1930s, but it is still very much alive today. 1 Introduction 2 The birth of a sharp practice 3 High tide for the anthropic principle 4 How not to do things with numbers 5 The recalcitrant sloppiness of crud 6 How excited can excited carbon-12 be? 7 Is a pile of doubts a doubtful pile? 8 Conclusion. (shrink)

Beginning with a reflection on ‘conceptual schemes’ and ‘very’ ideas and proceeding to examine different approaches to thinking philosophy of science not only with Kant but also between traditional analytic and hermeneutico-phenomenological approaches, this essay features a review of Kant’s 1755 solar nebular hypothesis and a reading of Nietzsche and Kant on cosmology along with a reflection on chemistry and the properties of cinnabar. Overall it is argued that a philosophy of science must be critical rather than normative/prescriptive. Seeking (...) to raise the question of science along with the question of truth, the essay also raises the question of esoteric historiography in science, including alchemy. (shrink)

The cosmology elaborated in the Hengxian is eclectic. Its most salient point is the notion of self–generation which most probably stems from some other independent source no longer extant today. Apart from the cosmology of self–generation, there existed three other types of cosmology in ancient China: ‘nonpresence to presence’ cosmology, numerological cosmology, and mythological cosmology. Interestingly, the pursuit of the cosmological problematic led ancient Chinese thought to two antinomies. The first one revolved around the (...) issue of whether the world and the myriad things have a beginning. The latter antinomy regarded the question of whether the generation and transformation of the world and the myriad things is caused by ‘some agency’ or whether there is ‘no maker’ involved in the cosmological process. These two antinomies have their close counterparts in two of the four antinomies introduced by Immanuel Kant, which attests to the depth of philosophical reasoning in ancient China. (shrink)

Quantum theory plays an increasingly significant role in contemporary early-universe cosmology, most notably in the inflationary origins of the fluctuation spectrum of the microwave background radiation. I consider the two main strategies for interpreting standard quantum mechanics in the light of cosmology. I argue that the conceptual difficulties of the approaches based around an irreducible role for measurement - already very severe - become intolerable in a cosmological context, whereas the approach based around Everett's original idea of treating (...) quantum systems as closed systems handles cosmological quantum theory satisfactorily. Contemporary cosmology, which indeed applies standard quantum theory without supplementation or modification, is thus committed - tacitly or explictly - to the Everett interpretation. (shrink)

Nietzsche's doctrine of the -eternal recurrence of the same- - the conception that the universe of events repeats itself in the same sequence, to infinity - is often taken to be logically incoherent: if an event recurs, it is not identically the same as the event itself, and if taken as self-identical cannot be the recurrence of anything. This book offers a new interpretation of the doctrine so as to rescue it from the charge of incoherence. It shows that the (...) doctrine is an outgrowth of ideas found in Nietzsche's philosophy of nature, among them that space is Riemannian and that time is relative to events, not an independently existing continuum which underlies events.". (shrink)

The successes scored by the big bang model of cosmic evolution in the 1960’s led to an intensive application of quantum theory to the problem of how the expansion might have begun and what its likely first stages were. It seemed as though an incredibly precise setting of the initial conditions would have been needed in order that a long-lived galactic universe containing heavy elements might develop. One response was to suppose that the fine-tuning could somehow be explained by the (...) presence of humans in the universe. This ran quite counter to the traditional supposition, according to which an initial "chaos" was sufficient. This essay outlines the history of the two principles, argues that the so-called "weak" anthropic principle is banal, distinguishes between two sorts of anthropic explanation, and assesses the prospects of the anthropic turn in cosmology. (edited). (shrink)

Precision Medicine has become a common label for data-intensive and patient-driven biomedical research. Its intended future is reflected in endeavours such as the Precision Medicine Initiative in the USA. This article addresses the question whether it is possible to discern a new ‘medical cosmology’ in Precision Medicine, a concept that was developed by Nicholas Jewson to describe comprehensive transformations involving various dimensions of biomedical knowledge and practice, such as vocabularies, the roles of patients and physicians and the conceptualisation of (...) disease. Subsequently, I will elaborate my assessment of the features of Precision Medicine with the help of Michel Foucault, by exploring how precision medicine involves a transformation along three axes: the axis of biomedical knowledge, of biomedical power and of the patient as a self. Patients are encouraged to become the managers of their own health status, while the medical domain is reframed as a data-sharing community, characterised by changing power relationships between providers and patients, producers and consumers. While the emerging Precision Medicine cosmology may surpass existing knowledge frameworks; it obscures previous traditions and reduces research-subjects to mere data. This in turn, means that the individual is both subjected to the neoliberal demand to share personal information, and at the same time has acquired the positive ‘right’ to become a member of the data-sharing community. The subject has to constantly negotiate the meaning of his or her data, which can either enable self-expression, or function as a commanding Superego. (shrink)

Maximus the Confessor was an important Byzantine thinker, the 'father of Byzantine theology'. This study describes his metaphysical world-view. The discussion covers Maximus' doctrine of creation, the Logos and the logoi, the cosmic order, the activities or energies of God, and how created beings may participate in God.

During the last decade new developments in theoretical and speculative cosmology have reopened the old discussion of cosmology's scientific status and the more general question of the demarcation between science and non-science. The multiverse hypothesis, in particular, is central to this discussion and controversial because it seems to disagree with methodological and epistemic standards traditionally accepted in the physical sciences. But what are these standards and how sacrosanct are they? Does anthropic multiverse cosmology rest on evaluation criteria (...) that conflict with and go beyond those ordinarily accepted, so that it constitutes an “epistemic shift” in fundamental physics? The paper offers a brief characterization of the modern multiverse and also refers to a few earlier attempts to introduce epistemic shifts in the science of the universe. It further discusses the several meanings of testability, addresses the question of falsifiability as a sine qua non for a theory being scientific, and briefly compares the situation in cosmology with the one in systematic biology. Multiverse theory is not generally falsifiable, which has led to proposals from some physicists to overrule not only Popperian standards but also other evaluation criteria of a philosophical nature. However, this is hardly possible and nor is it possible to get rid of explicit philosophical considerations in some other aspects of cosmological research, however advanced it becomes. (shrink)

In [3], Quentin Smith claims that `the Hartle-Hawking cosmology' is inconsistent with classical theism in a way which redounds to the discredit of classical theism; and, moreover, that the truth of `the Hartle- Hawking cosmology' would undermine reasonsed belief in any other varieties of theism which hold that the universe is created.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, in the chapter on the antinomy of pure reason, Kant not only argues that aprioristic cosmology is doomed to failure; he also implies that empirical knowledge about the universe is impossible. Today, such a negative verdict about the possibility of cosmological knowledge seems implausible because physical cosmology has made substantial progress. In particular, the spatiotemporal extension of the universe now seems a matter of empirical investigation in which models figure centrally. But I (...) think it is worth considering the possibility that Kant got something right and that he offers insights that can help us to better understand problems in present-day cosmology. In this article, I explore a striking coincidence: according to both Kant and current wisdom, cosmology faces a serious underdetermination problem regarding the spatiotemporal extension of the world. As a closer analysis reveals, however, Kant and modern cosmology differ on the reasons why underdetermination arises. In current cosmology, underdetermination follows from laws that are knowable a posteriori, and not only from the very idea of cosmological knowledge, as Kant would have it. This suggests that the current underdetermination problem is not fully a Kantian one. (shrink)

Ellis and Murphy show how contemporary sciences actually support a religiously based ethic of nonviolence, not by appealing to the Enlightment's mechanismic ...

This book presents the history of how the universe at large became the object of scientific understanding. Starting with the ancient creation myths, it offers an integrated and comprehensive account of cosmology that covers all major events from Aristotle's Earth-centred cosmos to the recent discovery of the accelearting universe.

Cardinal Mercier’s Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy is a standard work, prepared at the Higher Institute of Philosophy, Louvain, mainly for the use of clerical students in Catholic Seminaries. Though undoubtedly elementary, it contains a clear, simple, and methodological exposition of the principles and problems of every department of philosophy, and its appeal is not to any particular class, but broadly human and universal. Volume I includes a general introduction to philosophy and sections on cosmology, psychology, criteriology, and metaphysics (...) or ontology. (shrink)

This work inaugurates a critical inquiry into whether the ideas of Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, are used by astronomers and astrophysicists, a practicing community of scientists. It examines four basic components of Karl Popper's philosophy— falsification, prohibition, simplicity, and risk taking— and the extent that these themes become integrated into recent scientific literature on astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, and stellar evolutionary theory. It concludes that the philosophy of science is highly relevant to the practice of astronomy, and that (...) Karl Popper plays a unique role in directing different communities of astronomers and cosmologists. (shrink)

A Review of Gabriela Roxana Carone, Plato’s Cosmology and its Ethical Dimensions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005.

I explain the difficulty of making various concepts of and relating to probability precise, rigorous and physically significant when attempting to apply them in reasoning about objects living in infinite-dimensional spaces, working through many examples from cosmology. I focus on the relation of topological to measure-theoretic notions of and relating to probability, how they diverge in unpleasant ways in the infinite-dimensional case, and are even difficult to work with on their own. Even in cases where an appropriate family of (...) spacetimes is finite-dimensional, and so admits a measure of the relevant sort, however, it is always the case that the family is not a compact topological space, and so does not admit a physically significant, well behaved probability measure. Problems of a different but still deeply troubling sort plague arguments about likelihood in that context, which I also discuss. I conclude that most standard forms of argument used in cosmology to estimate the likelihood of the occurrence of various properties or behaviors of spacetimes have serious mathematical, physical and conceptual problems. (shrink)

Contemporary science presents us with the remarkable theory that the universe began to exist about fifteen billion years ago with a cataclysmic explosion called "the Big Bang." The question of whether Big Bang cosmology supports theism or atheism has long been a matter of discussion among the general public and in popular science books, but has received scant attention from philosophers. This book sets out to fill this gap by means of a sustained debate between two philosophers, William Lane (...) Craig and Quentin Smith, who defend opposing positions. Craig argues that the Big Bang that began the universe was created by God, while Smith argues that the Big Bang has no cause. Alternating chapters by the two philosophers criticize and attempt to refute preceding arguments. Their arguments are based on Einstein's theory of relativity and include a discussion of the new quantum cosmology recently developed by Stephen Hawking and popularized in A Brief History of Time. (shrink)