Blumenberg’s presentation of the history of cosmology as an introduction to the genesis of the Copernican world

Cosmology, especially as a pre-Copernican question of metaphysics, represented one of the central questions of thought throughout the history of the Western horizon: the relationship between metaphysics and cosmology was questioned with Copernicus major work on cosmology and especially in post-Copernican literature where the position of metaphysics alone was questioned. Following this, Hans Blumenberg (?1996) in his work ?Genesis of the Copernican world? presented the history of cosmos thinking from ancient cosmology through the relationship of cosmos and tragedy to the postclassicalidealistic development of science and cosmology within the field of natural science, encyclopedically presenting the results of his research. The main hypothesis of this paper is reflected in proving how Blumenberg, by expounding the genesis of the Copernican world and presenting the thesis of the ?ambiguity of heaven?, actually sets out the preconditions for the development of modern science in the field of natural science thinking. Namely, modern science is in fact the result of a history of thought with all it?s essential principles on the path of clarity and certainty, and finally to the pinnacle of science which is theoretically manifested in exactness. The ultimate goal of the paper is to present the genesis of the ambiguity of heaven to modern cosmology and cosmological research in modern times, especially - on the example of Blumenberg?s work

A Brief History of Cosmology

We present the evolution of our ideas concerning the history of the Cosmos. They are based on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity in which E.P. Hubble and G. Lemaître brought two fundamental new concepts: the expansion of the Universe and the model of the Big Bang. They form the basic elements of the modern theory of Cosmology. We present very briefly the observational evidence which corroborates this picture based on a vast amount of data, among which the most recent ones come from the Planck mission with a detailed measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. We show that during its evolution the Universe went through several phase transitions giving rise to the formation of particles, atoms, nuclei, etc. A particular phase transition, which occurred very early in the cosmic history, around 10–12 seconds after the Big Bang, is the Brout–Englert–Higgs (BEH) transition during which a fraction of the energy was transformed into mass, thus making it possible for most elementary particles to become massive.

5. Cosmology

Cosmology began as a scientific discipline at the beginning of the 20th century, with the work of Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble. Gravitational interaction is fundamental to cosmology, as gravity dominates over all other forces on large-scale distances. ‘Cosmology’ outlines the modern history of cosmology, discussing how studies have provided knowledge on the early Universe and its expansion. The Concordance Model proposes that only c.5 per cent of the energy in the Universe is in the form of normal matter; c.25 per cent is in the form of the gravitationally attractive dark matter; and the remaining c.70 per cent is in the form of the gravitationally repulsive dark energy. But there is still much to learn.

THE STORY OF RAPE: WRONGDOING AND THE EMOTIONAL IMAGINATION

This is a response to John Gardner’s article – The wrongness of rape. It claims that Gardner is fundamentally or radically wrong; not by attacking his careful and well-constructed argument from the ‘inside’ – by attempting to demonstrate some logical flaw in his argument – but by attacking his world-view. He shows us a world which simply does not accord with reality as perceived in our everyday lives by most, or all, of us. Whilst many philosophers, and certainly most philosophers of law, analyse the world in the way exemplified by Gardner, it is to be hoped that they reserve this analysis to their professional lives and do not make the mistake of thinking that it is connected with reality. For them reason prevails with emotion being relegated to the status of a mere ‘epiphenomenon’; whilst, for most of us, our emotional life is at least as important as our rational life.This article is an invitation to Gardner and others to make a ‘paradigm shift’ in the sense proposed by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn, in his explanation of the history of cosmology, showed how in order to explain the observed motion of the planets increasingly complicated systems of circular orbits were used (consisting of cycles, epicycles, epi-epicycles and so forth). These complex systems of orbits were used to explain the motion of the planets round the sun because people refused to believe that the planets could move in anything other than perfect circles. However, as the observational data grew it became clear that no system of circular orbits, no matter how complex, could explain the observations. When Johannes Kepler advanced the work of Nicolas Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Galileo Galilei and showed that the orbit of Mars could be best modelled by showing that it was elliptical, the problem was solved. Similarly, it is averred that no system of purely rational explanation, such as that advanced by Gardner, can explain the wrongness of rape. The explanation needs to start from a different position by explicitly including emotion in the explanation.