In a wide range of contemporary debates on Japanese cultures of technological practice, brief reference is often made to distinct Shinto legacies, as forming an animist substratum of indigenous spiritual beliefs and cosmological imaginations. Japan has been described as a land of Shinto-infused ‘techno-animism’: exhibiting a ‘polymorphous perversity’ that resolutely ignores boundaries between human, animal, spiritual and mechanical beings. In this article, we deploy instances of Japanese techno-animism as sites of theoretical experimentation on what Bruno Latour calls a (...) symmetrical anthropology of nature-cultures. In staging a dialogue between actor-network theory and Japanese techno-animism, we show how Shinto cosmograms provide an enlivening and alternative diffraction device on several of the ontological motifs manifested in Latour’s work. In particular, by mobilizing the territory of a ‘new’ animism debate in anthropology – manifested in the work of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – we attempt to infuse Latourian ‘multinaturalism’ with new, other-than-western analytical energy. Extending actor-network theory, we argue, Shinto cosmograms offer an interesting vantage point for interpreting the immanent, affective, enchanting and enabling powers of non-humans in contributing to collective life. By thus broadening the ‘cosmopolitical’ imagination beyond Latour’s own European-Catholic frame of reference, Shinto techno-animism offers up a wider reflection on contemporary entanglements of science, politics, ecology and cosmos. This reflection, we conclude, opens up a new intellectual territory, allowing us to trace techno-animist streams of thinking both ‘East’ and ‘West’, beyond the confines of the scientific naturalism indigenous to European thinking. (shrink)

This volume features in-depth philosophical analyses of major Japanese Confucian philosophers as well as themes and topics addressed in their writings. Its main historical focus is the early-modern period (1600-1868), when much original Confucian philosophizing occurred. Written by scholars from the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, and China and eclectic in methodology and disciplinary approach, this anthology seeks to advance new multidimensional studies of Japanese Confucian philosophy for English language readers. It presents essays that focus on Japanese Confucianism, while (...) including topics related to Buddhism, Shintō, Nativism, and even Andō Shōeki (1703-1762), one of the most vehement critics of Confucianism in all of East Asia. The book builds on the premise that Japanese Confucian philosophy consists in the ongoing engagement in critical, self-reflective discussions of and speculative theorizing about ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, political theory, and spiritual problems, as well as aesthetics, cosmology, and ontology. (shrink)

This book was translated from the French by Marco Pallis. It is divided into three parts: in The Tracks of Buddhism, Buddhism's Ally in Japan Shintö or the Way of the Gods, and Vistas of the Mahäyäna. The first has ten short essay chapters, Originality of Buddhism, Message and Messenger, Charity and Existence, The Question of Illusion, A Buddhist Eye on Science, Cosmological and Eschatological Viewpoints, More About Human Destinies--the Function of Mercy, What is Matter and Who is Mära?, Some (...) fallacies and facts concerning Buddhism, and Glimpses into Zen. These essays do not present the philosophical systems of Buddhism but rather attempt to give a picture of the spirit of Buddhism. The second part has three short essay chapters: Science, Myth, and the Meaning of Ancestors, Ethics and Mythology of Shinto, and The Noble Virtues: Some lessons of Shinto. The third part contains four essay chapters: Treasures of Buddhism, Mystery of the Bodhisattva, The Feminine Element in Mahayana, and Synthesis of the Päramitäs. Contrary to the trend of recent books which are attempting to differentiate the acceptances of the various schools within Buddhism, this book tends to stress similarities even with non-Buddhist Indian systems. It is best suited for those who would like to enter into the general spirit of Indian religions without necessarily concentrating on Buddhism.--P. J. H. (shrink)

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)

A reprint of the Routledge edition of 1935.

Inspired by “One Note Samba,” a standard jazz repertoire, we present an outline of Bose-Einstein Condensate Cosmology (BECC). Although this approach seems awkward and a bit off the wall at first glance, it is not impossible to connect altogether BEC, Scalar Field Cosmology and Feshbach Resonance with Ermakov-Pinney equation. We also discuss shortly possible link with our previous paper, where we describe Newtonian Universe with Vortex in terms of Ermakov equation.

One of the major philosophical texts of the 20th century, Process and Reality is based on Alfred North Whitehead’s influential lectures that he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the 1920s on process philosophy. Whitehead’s master work in philsophy, Process and Reality propounds a system of speculative philosophy, known as process philosophy, in which the various elements of reality into a consistent relation to each other. It is also an exploration of some of the preeminent thinkers of the seventeenth (...) and eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant. The ultimate edition of Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality is a standard reference for scholars of all backgrounds. (shrink)

It has been known for long time that most of the existing cosmology models have singularity problem. Cosmological singularity has been a consequence of excessive symmetry of flow, such as “Hubble’s law”. More realistic one is suggested, based on Newtonian cosmology model but here we include the vertical-rotational effect of the whole Universe. We review a Riccati-type equation obtained by Nurgaliev, and solve the equation numerically with Mathematica. It is our hope that the new proposed method can be (...) verified with observation data. (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.

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)

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.

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

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)

No pre-Socratic philosopher, perhaps, has caused more disagreement, or been more variously interpreted, than Anaxagoras of Clazomenae. Among recent attempts to reconstruct his system some of the more notable are those of Tannery, Bailey, Cornford, Peck, and Vlastos. Each of these reconstructions, and especially that of Tannery, has its adherents; and since none of them has much in common with any other, a universally acceptable solution to the fundamental problems involved may well by now seem unattainable. It is my belief, (...) however, and it is the object of this paper to try to prove, that all these modern reconstructions have at least one quality in common, namely an undue complication. The actual system of Anaxagoras was, I believe, considerably simpler than any reconstruction yet forthcoming. Unfortunately what I take to be the basis of the whole system, Anaxagoras' reaction to his Eleatic predecessors, is by.no means easy to convey in brief and simple terms. But if I should succeed in conveying it, then it will, I hope, be seen in itself to possess such a simplicity and neatness that my contention will carry with it a fair warrant of its own truth. I shall, for convenience, divide my argument into ten sections, to which I shall append a brief summary of my conclusions. (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)

This article explores the relation between two different modes of cosmology: the social and the scientific. Over the twentieth century, scientific understandings of the dimensions and operations of the physical universe changed dramatically, significantly prompted by astronomical and astrophysical research undertaken at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. Could those understandings be readily translated into social theory? Studies across a range of disciplines have intimated that the scientific cosmos might be less essential to the worlds of meaning and (...) belonging that people and communities compose around themselves than more local and relational models of an ordered whole. The article applies that proposition to the Mount Wilson Observatory itself, arguing that the observatory’s founder, George Ellery Hale, and his acolytes were deeply invested in practices of terrestrial place-making, the politics of belonging, and the cadences of civilizational time as applied to their city and its region. Moreover, they struggled to construct a philosophy integrating the cosmos they were seeking to fix at home with the contortions and careering trajectories of the universal whole. (shrink)

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)

We analyse aspects of the Big Bang program in modern cosmology, with special focus on the strategies employed by its adherents both in defending the theory against anomalous data and in dismissing rival accounts. We illustrate this by critically examining four aspects of Big Bang cosmology: the interpretation of the cosmic red-shift, the explanation of the cosmic background radiation, the inflation hypothesis and the search for dark matter. We conclude that the Big Bang's dominance of contemporary cosmology (...) is not justified by the degree of experimental support it receives relative to rival theories. (shrink)

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.

This book examines Aristotle's critical reaction to the mathematical cosmology of Plato's Academy, and traces the aporetic method by which he developed his own ...

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)

This article deals with developments of Shinto in the seventeenth century, focussing on the school of Yoshikawa Shinto. It is presented as an example of the coalition between Shinto and Neo-Confucianism intellectuals typical for that time. Pointing out the medieval predecessors of this coalition, the article argues that the theological ideas of Yoshikawa Shinto were much more indebted to medieval Shinto than is generally assumed. This is demonstrated by a doctrinal comparison as well as by (...) a historiographical sketch of the relations between Yoshikawa Shinto and Yoshida Shinto. Both schools regarded themselves as legitimate representatives of Japan's original Way of the kami. The article examines the internaljustifications of these claims as well as their acknowledgments by thepolitical authorities. (shrink)

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.