Cosmology
The term cosmology stands for a family of related inquiries, all in some sense concerned with the world at large. Two main subgroups of uses may be distinguished: those belonging to philosophy and those belonging to science.
"Cosmology" has received wide currency as a name for a branch of metaphysics, ever since Christian von Wolff, in his Discursus Praeliminaris de Philosophia in Genere (1728), gave cosmology a prominent place in his classificatory scheme of the main forms of philosophical knowledge and distinguished this branch from ontology, theology, and psychology. (See Discourse on Philosophy in General, translated by R. J. Blackwell, Indianapolis, 1963, Para. 77). Despite the severe strictures that Immanuel Kant leveled against the pursuit of rational cosmology in his Critique of Pure Reason, the term has continued to enjoy a standard use among many philosophers. For example, it occupies a central place in the manuals of scholastic philosophy; these adhere, for the most part, to the Wolffian scheme of classification of the branches of metaphysics. The term has been used, too, by many philosophers not in the scholastic tradition; for example, A. E. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics (London, 1903) assigns to cosmology the task of considering "the meaning and validity of the most universal conceptions of which we seek to understand the nature of the individual objects which make up the experienced physical world, 'extension,' 'succession,' 'space,' 'time,' 'number,' 'magnitude,' 'motion,' 'change,' 'quality,' and the more complex categories of 'matter,' 'force,' 'causality,' 'interaction,' 'thinghood,' and so forth" (p.
