This chapter analyzes the paradox between the scientific decentering of humanity and the recentering of human responsibility in the Anthropocene, arguing that a Daoist perspective, which emphasizes cosmic entanglement and perspectival knowledge, resolves this contradiction by subverting the human–nature dichotomy.

This chapter investigates the underappreciated influence of the Sophist on Plutarch’s cosmology. By analyzing various Plutarchean works (including De animae procreatione in Timaeo, De Iside et Osiride, De defectu oraculorum, and Adversus Colotem), it argues that Plutarch describes the ontological structure of the World-Soul in the Timaeus as an ‘imitation’ of the structure of intelligible being constituted by the Greatest Kinds in the Sophist. This reading positions the Sophist as a key text for understanding Plutarch’s Platonic metaphysics of the soul and, more broadly, some of the basic assumptions of Plutarch’s Platonism.

The introduction provides some material data on the reception of the Sophist (including an overview of all the skopoi it was assigned and all the ancient commentaries on the dialogue the sources give us notice of), and a bird’s-eye view of some of the main themes and arguments featured in the dialogue, with the prospect of highlighting the main threads of its ancient fortune and providing a synopsis of the fourteen chapters constituting the volume

This chapter reassesses the evidence for connecting Xenocrates’ account of the World-Soul with the Greatest Kinds of the Sophist. It argues there are no solid grounds to attribute this exegetical strategy to Xenocrates, countering a tradition initiated by Plutarch. The findings support the view that the Early Academy primarily employed the Sophist for debates on classification, division, and genus–species relations, not in other contexts, including cosmological.

Chapter 6 traces the common elements of three field sites and research themes: Cuban espiritismo, Brazilian Umbanda, and Chilean ufology, to understand how cosmology is fractured, incomplete, emergent, and, in some cases, without an exterior referent. In Cuba and Brazil, not-knowing becomes a facet of a cosmology that is not entirely forthcoming, or of a cosmos of spirits that are simply unknowable in their essences, despite their overt appearances in cultural “clothes.” Unknowing here excites the cosmogonic, or world-producing impulse, very often through materials and objects. In ufology, instances of the “absurd” – where no sense can be made of visual perceptions or experiences – are attributed to the deceitful characteristics of their alien perpetrators who remain in a continuous conceptual dark. If in the first two cases it is the body and its cosmos which are negated as sources of knowledge, whereas in the third it is physical reality itself.

Throughout their history, philosophy and astronomy have been closely linked. Astronomy and cosmology inhabit novel epistemic spaces, and have novel epistemic aims, relative to more standard sciences. As the philosophy of astronomy emerges as an independent subdiscipline, the special nature of explanation and prediction within astronomy requires further examination and articulation. Unlike conventional experimental sciences, astronomy typically deals with entities and systems that are outside the reach of human intervention. Furthermore, astronomy and cosmology are historical sciences. This chapter evaluates the epistemology of astronomy by focusing on the canons of explanation, prediction, and theoretical success that are particular to astronomy. Demonstrations of the successes and shortcomings of philosophical models of explanation and prediction are given with respect to the eighteenth-century discovery of stellar aberration and the more recent conjectures of dark matter and dark energy.

This chapter discusses the development of technologies that made possible the detection and imaging of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), relic radiation from the aftermath of the big bang. It analyzes how these technologies originated in military-funded projects, from radar research during World War II to Cold War-era US Air Force funding of experiments with satellites, radio telescopes, and U2-planes. In some instances, the instruments were originally designed for defense use and were subsequently adapted and applied to astronomical and cosmological observation, while in other instances the Air Force directly funded the basic science experiments themselves. In addition to analyzing the practices surrounding the production of CMB images, the chapter dialogues with recent work on scientific realism and how military funding of science reveals important insights into teleological truth-seeking and pragmatic aspects of scientific inquiry.

This chapter surveys Byzantine pneumatology in three directions. First, it undertakes to present a synopsis of the Spirit’s divine identity and hypostatic particularities in polemical contexts, as illustrated by Athanasius’ Letters to Serapion, Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, Gregory of Constantinople’s Fifth Theological Oration, and Photios’ Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. Second, and drawing on some of these and other patristic sources (Basil’s Homilies on the Hexaemeron, John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Genesis) in addition to liturgical texts such as the matins antiphons, the chapter addresses aspects of the Spirit’s economy, such as its participation in creation, providence and sanctification. Third, it considers matters pertaining to the Spirit’s presence in the lives of glorified saints according to Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on John and Homilies on Luke, Maximos the Confessor’s Ambigua, various Byzantine homilists, Symeon the New Theologian’s Discourses and hesychast writings (Gregory of Sinai, Gregory Palamas).

Timothy S. Murphy explores William Burroughs’ oeuvre as a “singularity” in three overlapping senses: aesthetic uniqueness, philosophical resistance to generalization, and cosmological metaphor. Burroughs’ cut-up novels – Naked Lunch, The Nova Trilogy, and beyond – embody a form of narrative experimentation that resists categorization and disrupts conventional literary logic. Drawing on concepts from astrophysics, Murphy aligns Burroughs’ work with the disruptive force of black holes, novae, and supernovae. Through a close reading of the trilogy’s stellar metaphors, especially the figure of Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, Murphy argues that Burroughs anticipates a model of narrative that is both destructive and generative – annihilating fixed identities and control structures while offering the possibility of linguistic and ontological renewal. The “Burroughs singularity,” codenamed WSB X-1, represents a continual feedback loop between collapse and creation, producing texts as unstable, irradiated, and transformative as the cosmic phenomena they metaphorically invoke.

This chapter interprets the Anthropocene as a stage in the emergence of deep time as a concept in Western culture beginning in the eighteenth century. The literary histories of deep time and the Anthropocene converge in many places. Like theorists of the Anthropocene today, earlier writers on deep time explored the divergence and convergence of human and natural histories while also reflecting on cultural variation in the articulation of these two notionally separate histories. This chapter traces the popular science of deep time through the writings of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), Hugh Miller (1802-1856), and George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), the American geographer who is sometimes regarded as a founder of the Anthropocene concept as well. These writings promote the specialization of the modern geosciences and set them off against “unscientific” long-scale cosmologies. Though it inherits their colonial bias, the Anthropocene frame can facilitate our recovery of these non-Western cosmologies intertwined with the history of deep time. The age of the earth, the newness of our species, and other geological canons of deep time may once again be considered side-by-side with other knowledge and memory practices that bear on these ideas, as they were by early geological thinkers.

This chapter explores how Indigenous relationships with Country and Indigenous knowledge systems can profoundly reshape mainstream societies’ understanding of place and planet. Using reflections from Gumbaynggirr and Awabakal Country, it demonstrates how Indigenous conceptions of Country embody deep kinship ties to land, waters, environment, and community, extending far beyond Western notions of land as property or resource. Dreaming stories illustrate sophisticated understandings of long-term environmental change and offer crucial lessons in sustainability, custodianship, and adaptation. The chapter also highlights the transformative role of universities, particularly through positions such as Pro Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous), in embedding Indigenous knowledge across all disciplines, building bicultural competence, and reshaping curricula to reflect Aboriginal perspectives. This integration enriches both teaching and research, while fostering respectful and reciprocal engagement with Indigenous communities. Ultimately, such approaches promote collective responsibility for Country and advance more sustainable, just, and enduring futures.

Educating graduate students aims at making them competent members in a disciplinary community and culture. This chapter identifies PhD student training as a curious process in which instruction and the advancement of science go together. It examines how a PhD student was instructed to tackle a common, though often challenging, problem of science with large datasets: calibrating a new dataset and combining it with data from a different source for analysis. By following this student around over two years as she achieved this goal, the author learnt how she became a competent member in the community and culture of extragalactic astronomy. Conversely, it is possible to gain insights into what makes combining scientific datasets often so challenging. As such, this chapter applies the tactics of Chapter 2 – take a problem of data-intensive science, consider how it is “staffed” in a specific case, and follow its management ethnographically – to another setting. This account serves as a resource for the next two chapters, on uses of diagrams and mundane reasoning in research with large datasets.

After finishing Sons and Lovers Lawrence wrote a ‘Foreword’ in which he tried, in an elusive, oracular mode, to clarify, for his own and Edward Garnett’s benefit, the broader cultural, almost cosmological directions that he understood the novel to have pinpointed. This document initiated a series of remarkable philosophical excursuses on Lawrence’s part in the 1910s responding at first to Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, and, after mid-1914, the Italian Futurists. In these essays the cosmological would be wrestled into commerce with the everyday. The space thereby opened up for fiction gave Lawrence the opportunity to render the inner movements of deep and unacknowledged urges rather than externally dramatising them in the clear air of realism. His stories of mid-1913, ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, as well as earlier ones revised in mid-1914 for the Prussian Officer collection, demonstrate the development. A performative habit of pushing emotions and states of being to clarifying end-points emerged, nowhere more compellingly than in the revised versions of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and ‘Daughters of the Vicar’.

The concept of attractors, well-known in classical mechanics, proved to be very productive in supergravity, in the theory of black holes and inflationary cosmology. We start with attractors in supersymmetric black holes and discuss also non-BPS black hole attractors. Recently the non-BPS case helped to explain, via enhanced duality symmetry, mysterious cancellation of ultraviolet divergences in 82 Feynman diagrams in 4-loop superamplitude in N=5 supergravity. We discuss the implications of these results for the possibility of the all-loop finiteness of N>4 4D supergravities.We continue with the description of inflationary α-attractors. This large class of inflationary models gives predictions that are stable with respect to even very significant modifications of inflationary potentials. These predictions match all presently available CMB-related cosmological data. These models provide targets for the future satellite mission LiteBIRD, which will attempt to detect primordial gravitational waves. We describe some of the recent advanced versions of cosmological attractors which have a beautiful fractal landscape structure.

Although only one book by Hipparchus is extant, the Commentary on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus (CPAE), it is known from ancient sources that he wrote several others, a few fragments of which survive in quotations from later writers. A reconstructed list of his works is provided, together with a description of their possible contents and scope. In addition, a partial chronological ordering is provided, based on internal and external evidence. Following on from this, a summary discussion of Hipparchus’ achievements is given, covering his work on precession and the length of the year. Also briefly discussed here are his contributions to mathematics and astronomy, which are elaborated in Chapters 5 and 6.

This chapter examines place-identity by finding it first in the pre-Christian schooling and educational practices from the Post-Classic Period (1400--1500 CE), demonstrating their complexity in the realm of the Triple Alliance. It focuses in on two of the most important altepemeh in the Valley of Mexico, Tetzcoco and Tenochtitlan. These and other fifteenth-century Nahua cities featured specialized schools, often if not exclusively run by priestly teachers, that were known as calmecac (‘house of the lineage’, schools for the sons of nobles with an emphasis on military training and religion), telpochcalli (‘youth house’, the schools for commoner boys), cuicacalli (‘song house’ in which ritual practices were emphasized for boys and girls), and ritual learning spaces such as plazas and courtyards associated with temples and other kinds of structures. Significant here are a number of rich studies of formal educational practices, above all as they were pursued in the famous calmecac.

The introductory chapter compares two systems: the cosmological system of the Cherokee Nation and the Ogallala aquifer in Kansas. Ontological and epistemological systems are used to illustrate a new method of comparing phenomena across distinct cultural systems. Comparison is not based on the similarity between cultural or religious phenomena but on the analogy or homology of element function within distinct systems.