The introductory chapter compares two systems: the cosmological system of the Cherokee Nation and the Ogallala aquifer in Kansas. Ontological and epistemological systems are used to illustrate a new method of comparing phenomena across distinct cultural systems. Comparison is not based on the similarity between cultural or religious phenomena but on the analogy or homology of element function within distinct systems.

Chapter 8 tells the story of Lázaro, whose home collapsed and is now stuck in a long-term struggle to get the state authorities to assist him in rebuilding it. Here the focus is on the dire failures of the revolutionary state apparatus, though the twist is that, rather than cynically lamenting them, Lázaro maintains a steadfast conviction that the state will solve his problem. The reason for this, as we shall see, upends the whole framework of the revolutionary state’s relationship with people, since the source of Lázaro’s conviction in the state’s powers is not the revolutionary state itself, but rather certain spirits with which Lázaro has developed deep and abiding relationships, and who guide him through life, including in his interactions with the state authorities a propos his collapsed home. The chapter shows that the spirits’ mediation does not merely supplement Lázaro’s relationship with the revolutionary state, but rather upends its overall coordinates, drastically changing its shape. The signature ontological constitution of spirits is that they collapse dualist separations between spirit and matter, transcendence and immanence, ought and is – precisely the distinctions that mark out the coordinates within which the revolutionary project takes its shape. In so doing, the spirits present an altogether startling political possibility: a revolution able to deploy the transcendental structures and processes of the state in a way that somehow, per impossible, relates with people immanently in the intimate key of personal care.

We conduct a case study analysis of a proposal for the emergence of time based upon the approximate derivation of three grades of temporal structure within an explicit quantum cosmological model which obeys a Wheeler–DeWitt type equation without an extrinsic time parameter. Our main focus will be issues regarding the consistency of the approximations and derivations in question. Our conclusion is that the model provides a self-consistent account of the emergence of chronordinal, chronometric, and chronodirected structure. Residual concerns relate to explanatory rather than consistency considerations.

In a series of papers published during the last decades, with Mario Castagnino we developed a global and nonentropic approach to the arrow of time that follows John Earman’s “time direction heresy,” according to which the problem of the arrow of time can be addressed in terms of the geometry of space-time, independently of entropic arguments and without appealing to non–time-reversal invariance. The aim of this chapter is to present a review of the global and nonentropic approach to the arrow of time, and to consider some aspects that were not discussed in detail in those original works. In particular, it will be analyzed to what extent the arrow of time can still be defined if the conditions of time-orientability, cosmic time, and time-asymmetry are not satisfied. The role of time-reversal invariance in the present approach will also be discussed. Finally, certain issues about contingency, fundamentality, reducibility, and objectivity will be considered.

Chapter 6 turns to a cluster of broadly cosmological episodes: the events and agents of creation, the texts that tell of these events and agents, and the authors who wrote these more and less authoritative texts. It focuses on two stretches of Cyril’s Against Julian, broadly concerning the modes of divine management of the cosmos but covering topics ranging from the breadth of human diversity to the Mosaic sacrificial system to the Tower of Babel and Homer’s Aloadae giant brothers. Cyril’s consistent objective is to dislodge the characters of the gods from Julian’s Hellenic story while also demonstrating how much better sense they make within the Christian story as fallen demons. That “all the gods of the nations are demons” (LXX Ps 95:5) was, of course, a common apologetic line. But this re-narrating claim is more than a polemical trope, structuring in fact a surprising range of arguments.

This chapter focuses on presocratic thinkers living in Magna Graecia (Sicily and southern Italy) in the sixth and fifth centuries bce. The main theme is the unity of opposites (a form of antithesis), treated in various ways by these thinkers, and the economic, political and mystic influences on their treatments. Parmenides’ radical separation between the one and plurality (or the paths of truth and opinion) reflects the contrast between possession of money and its circulation. This is informed by Parmenides’ aristocratic outlook; his account of the two paths is also modelled on mystic initiation. The Pythagoreans and Empedokles both adopt a more inclusive framework that embraces opposites within an overall unity, symbolising both the possession and circulation of money and a broad political structure. The Pythagorean cosmos, conceived in terms of fire, harmony and order or calculation, accommodates both poles in their table of opposites. Empedokles’ cosmic cycle includes the opposed subjectivities (with political connotations) of love and strife, while reincarnation accommodates divergent and opposed states of selfhood within an overall wholeness. Unity of opposites is framed by these thinkers in terms of the (introjected) inner self and (projected) cosmos, matching the wholeness offered by mystic initiation.

Chapter Five was devoted to the metaphysics that underpins the Stoic theories of everlasting recurrence. The present chapter focusses on three of these theories in some detail. At least two of them, as I explain in section 6, are early Stoic. As we shall see, one is stronger than the other two, and the two weaker theories are revisions of it. A central component of this chapter is the thesis of Identity, according to which there must be a full type-identity between the events of any two cosmic cycles. Why should this thesis be true? Why could not the events be slightly, or even completely, different? Thus, sections 1 and 2 describe the three theories and how exactly they differ from one another. In sections 3 and 4 are devoted to the argument for Identity. The argument is based on the nature of the Stoic god. It is his full rationality that requires that the token-events of each new cosmos be fully type identical to those of the previous one. I close the chapter in Sections 5-6 with a discussion of the two weaker theories. What are their philosophical motivations? And in what order did they emerge in the history of Stoicism?

By way of conclusion, this chapter deals with two issues that are deeply connected to the argument of the book but that I shall leave open. The first one is Chrysippus’ own answer to question of why the Stoic god would want the conflagration if the new cosmos is identical to the old one and no improvement is possible. The second issue is when the Stoic god designs the cosmos if the series of cosmic cycle is beginningless and changeless. This second issue is related to the larger topic of cosmic creation and the link between the Stoic and the Christian god. Thus, it is of more general interest and may help to put the argument of the book in a wider historical perspective.

The chapter studies this mechanism in detail and focusses on the following questions. First, what are these ‘exhalations’ (ἀναθυμιάσεις) and why do they rise up in the sky? Secondly, why does the desiccation of the sublunary region cause celestial fire to descend to this region? More particularly, why does not celestial fire consume the sublunary region before it totally dries out, as an ordinary wildfire would consume a forest that is still relatively green and full of life? Thirdly, how does celestial fire consume the exhalations and the substances that it finds in the sublunary region? And, more generally, how do the Stoics conceive of the physical process by which a mass of fire consumes another body? In other words, how do they envision the phenomenon of combustion? Fourthly, what is the place of the concept of combustion in their elemental theory? And, finally, how long does the conflagration last?

The early Stoic cosmos is sharply different from that of Plato and Aristotle. But it is also unique compared to that of the Presocratics. In this chapter, I seek to prove that this is so by concentrating upon the Stoic theory of conflagration we just examined. The issue requires an in-depth discussion because Stoic cosmology owes enormously to the Presocratics, and the theory of conflagration is clearly the part of Stoic cosmology that has deeper roots in these early thinkers, much more so than the theories of cosmogony and everlasting recurrence

The conflagration is followed by a cosmony that restores the cosmos. In fact, a permanent end would be impossible given the rationality of the early Stoic god. In this chapter, I limit myself to asking what is the structure of the cosmogony. How, exactly, is the large mass of fire left by the conflagration transformed in the cosmogony into the differentiated masses of air, fire, water and earth that constitute the present cosmos? I shall argue that the cosmogony, which sets off as soon as the conflagration is over, divides into at least three basic stages: (a) the formation of the four elements and of the sublunary and supralunary regions as two differentiated parts of the cosmos, (b) the formation of composite homogeneous substances (gold, flesh, wood, etc.) out of the four elements; and (c) the formation of composite heterogeneous substances (animals and plants) out of homogeneous ones.