‘Cosmos’ and ‘History’ are both Greek words. ‘Cosmos’, which originally meant ‘order’, came to mean ‘the ordered structure of the universe’. ‘History’, which originally meant ‘investigation’, came to mean an account of human actions and the causes of conflicts. Systematic speculation on the cosmos and the effort to produce objective histories emerged together in a society where, perhaps for the first time, people reflected impartially on themselves and their world. This conjunction was no accident. Ancient Greece was the first major society in which people took responsibility for their own institutions and for their future. With autonomy, with people having to choose what laws to enact, what to make, what to do, how to organize society, they had to face the questions: What ought we to think about justice, about ourselves, about the cosmos and the nature of being? And they had to reflect critically on their actions. Unlimited interrogation exploded on the scene. Yet a tension emerged between Greek cosmology and Greek history. Equating knowing with perceiving, the Greeks believed that anything which can be an object of genuine knowledge must be permanent. Its triumph was to have found in the objects of mathematics something that met these conditions. With the Pythagoreans who argued that the order in nature is mathematical, the notion of cosmos as a timeless structure crystallized. History, being concerned with human actions and the rise and fall of individuals and cities, was clearly about that which is not permanent. The tension between cosmology, conceiving the cosmos as an immutable, timeless order, and history, concerned with actions, intentions, conflicts and the rise and fall of individuals and communities, has been at the core of virtually all intellectual and political oppositions throughout the history of European civilization. Natural philosophy and social philosophy are sub-disciplines within which the tension between cosmology and history must be grappled with. These are the disciplines which critically reflect upon the assumptions of not only the natural sciences, the human sciences and the humanities, but also on the relationship between knowledge of the world and ourselves and ethics and politics, on how we should live and how we should organize society. But these disciplines only have a very tenuous place in universities, and their separation militates against an adequate consideration of their relationship. What is required is a combination of natural and social philosophy, transcending all disciplinary boundaries, concerned with the fundamental issues of understanding the cosmos and our place within it as historical agents. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, provides a forum for this. It provides a focus to revive that unlimited interrogation of our cultural heritage introduced by the Ancient Greeks required for us to create the future. The journal encourages contributions from philosophically oriented thinkers from all disciplines. URL: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/
Keywords: Philosophy
ISSN: 18329101
EISSN:
Subject: Philosophy
Publisher: Cosmos and History
Year: 2005
Country: Australia
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