Abstract
The notion of “cosmos” is tied to a multiplicity of metaphysical ideas which imply both ontological concepts and mythological narratives dating back to Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths as well as to the “YHWH” tradition of ancient Israel. As a discipline, cosmology is connected to Christian Wolff, who plotted it in his rationalist metaphysics. While in the wake of rationalist philosophy and its increasing reference to empirical methods, the ontological presuppositions of cosmology lost their convincing power; modern developments tied to the linguistic and cultural turn allowed for a new interplay between mythological cosmologies and their hermeneutic understanding. Hence, methodological intersectionality has turned cosmology into an issue of interest far beyond theology and the study of antiquity to both transcendental and phenomenological approaches, continental and analytic philosophies, reaching out even to astronomical physics.
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Notes
- 1.
Christian Wolff, Cosmologia Generalis, §1, 1, Halle: Renger, 1737 (2nd edition), p. 1.
- 2.
Cf. Peter Gemeinhardt/Annette Zgoll (eds.), Weltkonstruktionen, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2010; in particular the contributions of Claus Wilke and Wayne Horowitz (Ancient Orient), Fredericke Herklotz (Egypt), Henrick Pfeiffer and Francis Young (Israel and Hellenistic Christianity).
- 3.
Cf. the contributions in: Armin Lange et al. (eds.), Mythos im Alten Testament und seiner Umwelt. Festschrift für Hans-Peter Müller, Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1999; Ulrich Barth, Abschied von der Kosmologie. Welterklärung und religiöse Endlichkeitsreflexion, in: Ulrich Barth, Religion in der Moderne, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003, pp. 401–426.
- 4.
Cf. Frank Crüsemann (ed.), Sozialgeschichtliches Wörterbuch zur Bibel, Gütersloh: Güterloher Verlagshaus, 2009.
- 5.
Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011 (German original: Idem, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1999); Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006; Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 (German original: Idem, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Munich: C.H.Beck, 1992).
- 6.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998; Idem, Means without End: Notes on Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
- 7.
Cf. Bertrand Russel and Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (three volumes), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910-1913; Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1929; Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design: The Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life, London: Bantham Press, 2010.
- 8.
Cf. the discussion of John Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology, Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991; Idem, Belief in God in an Age of Science, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) and the broad-ranging projects of the Templeton Foundation.
- 9.
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, The Basic Characteristics of Modernization, in: Idem., Modernization: Protest and Change, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966, pp. 1–19.
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Richter, C. (2019). Cosmos. In: Kühnhardt, L., Mayer, T. (eds) The Bonn Handbook of Globality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90382-8_45
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