Cosmologies

Cosmologies are worldviews on the nature of matter, space, and time that become depicted into cosmographies. Cosmologies define the nature of existence and detail how material entities come into being over time and how they change in space.  Western intellectual history has witnessed the evolution of four major cosmologies: the cosmology of the Ancient Greeks, the Judeo-Christians, Classical Physics and Natural History, and Modern Physics and Evolutionary Biology. As these cosmologies evolve over time, their cosmographies transition from wheels of time and chains of being to scales of nature, chronologies, pedigrees, seriations, timelines, phylogenetic trees, and networks. I collect and examine these diagrams and study how they change in correlation with shifting notions of time, which in turn impact our understanding of causality and our perception of reality.

Major papers on cosmologies, cosmographies, and time

Teleonomy as a problem of self-causation. (2023). Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 139, 4: 388–414.

Cosmological and phenomenological transitions into how humans conceptualize and experience time. (2018). Time and Mind 11 (3): 325-335

Time: The Biggest Pattern in Natural History Research. (2016). Evolutionary Biology 43 (4), 604-637.

Depicting the tree of life: The philosophical and historical roots of evolutionary tree diagrams. (2011). Evolution, Education and Outreach 4 (3): 515-38.