A cosmic perspective.

Ian Crawford summarizes the second of two meetings exploring the relationships between astrobiology, big history and cosmic perspectives.

This study analyzes Yusuf al-Qaradhawi's tafsir in Durûs fî al-Tafsîr: Tafsîr Juz 'Ammâ by examining the influence of al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun ideology on theological, social, da'wah, and economic aspects. Using descriptive analysis, this study shows that al-Qaradhawi's tafsir emphasizes the importance of collective faith connected to social and community solidarity. Although this tafsir shows linguistic depth, the lack of discussion of history causes gaps in understanding the context of the verse. Compared to Sayyid Qutb who offers a more cosmic perspective and focuses on the harmony of faith with the universe, al-Qaradhawi's interpretation is more applicable in integrating social principles. However, sometimes it seems idealistic when faced with the complexity of a plural society. In the social aspect, al-Qaradhawi's interpretation of Surah al-Ma'un highlights the importance of Islamic social institutions as a solution to injustice, but the challenges in organizing a plural society need to be taken into account. In the economic aspect, al-Qaradhawi's interpretation emphasizes economic justice and morality in trade but often pays less attention to the spiritual dimension in Islamic economic teachings. Overall, although al-Qaradhawi's tafsir shows pragmatic relevance in addressing contemporary challenges, this study suggests the need for a more holistic approach to harmonize the spiritual values of Islam and Islamic economic teachings.

Benatar argues that the absence of cosmic meaning is part of the reason why our lives are so bad that we had better not procreate. The goal of this paper is to argue against this claim from a Kantian point of view. For this goal, I argue first that the fact that human life is a product of blind evolution is not a reason for justifying that our lives are overall bad, mainly on the grounds that the concepts of good and bad make sense only within the logical space of reasons. I also argue that the fact that we can hardly make a significant difference to the universe is not a reason for justifying that our lives are overall bad, either, mainly on the grounds that whether one's life is good or bad can be evaluated primarily in terms of whether one's permissible ends are achieved to a satisfactory extent, and so one's good life does not depend on making a significant difference to the universe.

1. Astronomy in ancient and medieval China Joseph Needham 2. Indian astronomy: an historical perspective B. V. Subbarayappa 3. Making of astronomy in ancient India Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya 4. The impact of astronomy on the development of western science Jean-Claude Pecker 5. Man and the Universe Hubert Reeves 6. Understanding the Universe - challenges and directions in modern observational astronomy Harlan Smith, Jr: 7. Frontiers in cosmology Fred Hoyle 8. Did the Universe originate in a big bang? Jayant Narlikar 9. The dark matter problem Bernard Carr 10. Geometry and the Universe C. V. Vishveshwara 11. The origin and evolution of life Cyril Ponnamperuma 12. The anthropic principle: self selection as an adjunct to natural selection Brandon Carter 13. Astrology and science: an examination of the evidence Ivan Kelly, Roger Culver and Peter Loptson 14. Astronomy and science fiction Allen Janis.

Extremophiles are one of the most extreme entity on planet earth which can withstand many harsh conditions considered lethal for other life form of terrestrial life. From an evolutionary prospective, extremophiles are considered to be primitive cells that used to live in the early earths harsh environment living on this planet since billions of years, it can be found in almost in any environmental conditions on our planet. There are many established valuable uses of these extremophiles and particularly their bioactive compounds. The enzymes produced by extremophiles have significant applications in different industries like detergent, food, feed, starch, textile, leather, pulp and paper, and pharmaceuticals This chapter discuss extremophile, their survival mechanism and astrobiology, discussing life in a cosmic prospective.

A teacher explores the concepts of scale and perspective with his students as they consider what it means to share the planet with others while imagining more hopeful and just worlds.

This chapter is the second of two chapters concerned with whether life is meaningless. In this chapter, it is argued that life has no meaning sub specie aeternitatis (that is, no purpose or point from a cosmic perspective). Nihilism about cosmic meaning is the bad news. Some people deny that life lacks cosmic meaning while others argue that it does not matter that life lacks such meaning. The chapter responds to such arguments, some of which are theistic and some of which are secular. For example, it is argued that cosmic meaning is not to be found in God’s or nature’s purposes, or in the possibility that life on earth is the only life there is.

The present volume and the concept of “rooted cosmopolitanism” are raising important and timely issues about heritage and belonging at the interface of local human life worlds and global more-than-human responsibilities. In this contribution, I will take the concept of rooted cosmopolitanism one step further and explore human roots from a cosmic perspective.

Given this cognitive-developmental concern with superficiality-to-depth in moral judgment or understanding, Kohlberg was particularly concerned to discover and articulate an age trend and possible sequence of developmental advances or stages that may be universal. Our critique of Kohlberg’s theory notes that, although his specific stage typology was misguided, he almost single-handedly put cognitive moral development on the map of American psychology. He encouraged attention to the continued development of moral judgment beyond the childhood years. Finally, he speculated from case studies of mature moral thinkers in existential crisis that there may be a deeper reality (“cosmic perspective”), one that underlies profound moral perception and can support the moral life. Building from Kohlberg’s and others’ contributions, we propose in this chapter a new view of life-span sociomoral development.

The prospect of human contact with extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) carries profound societal implications, far surpassing the impact of discovering non-sentient microbes on distant planets. Such an encounter would reverberate throughout human society, challenging established beliefs, including theological doctrines, and reshaping our cosmic perspective. During the last decade, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and non-intelligent extraterrestrial life has received notable attention in digital media and newspapers and influenced public thoughts and perceptions about astrobiology, SETI and planetary science fields. This abstract takes a science communication and society perspective, evaluating our current decision-making processes and policies in anticipation of potential discoveries and their consequential interactions with varying forms of extraterrestrial life, including public attitudes, news dissemination and rumour control, and decoding and messaging ETIs.

In the mid‐1940s an idea arose that a crash of an atomically‐powered alien spaceship had caused the mysterious Tunguska explosion of 1908 in Siberia. Initially expressed as fiction, this speculation evolved into an active hypothesis that inspired decades’ worth of amateur investigations. This article examines the history of the Tunguska nuclear hypothesis and what it reveals about nuclear and technological culture in the USSR. It argues that Soviet technological imagination had a tendency to place the country's developments into a cosmic perspective that drew parallels between contemporary circumstances on Earth and the possible existence of technologies among civilizations elsewhere in the universe. Seeing the country's communist project as part of a cosmic drama involved a form of universalism that aligned with Marxist ideology, but also possessed distinctive influences and afterlives. By concentrating on cosmic analogies at play in Soviet technological imagination about Tunguska, this article also underscores how the suspected link between otherworldly civilizations and earthly actions informed ways of conceptualizing race and ethnicity, the boundaries of scientific knowledge, and the natural environment.

The New Minster Charter was written in 966 to commemorate and perpetuate the replacement of secular clergy with Benedictine monks at the New Minster, Winchester, which had been achieved through the agency of King Edgar (959-75). This was a controversial affair, and the document is correspondingly unusual (Pl. 2). The lengthy text in hermeneutic Latin, for which Bishop JE the wold of Winchester himself (963-84) may well have been responsible, describes the spiritual implications and the practical details of the new settlement, and attempts to sanctify and hence legitimize the arrangement in the most powerful way possible-by casting the affair into a cosmic perspective of the fall and redemption of mankind. The designer of the document realized precisely the same aim by preparing it according to the format of a supremely de luxe liturgical book. This is the ultimate development of the well-attested practice of adding sacred authority to a record by copying it into a gospel book.

This paper focuses on the connection between the Flourishing Tang Features and Li Bai’s landscape poems, exploring their interactive relationship from three main dimensions. Firstly, the Flourishing Tang Dynasty, characterized by political stability, economic prosperity, and cultural openness, nourished Li Bai’s landscape poems. Geographically, the expanded territory and smooth transportation broadened his creative vision, enabling his works to break away from the narrow local landscape and present a cosmic perspective covering landscapes like the Yellow River, Yangtze River, and Tianshan Mountains; spiritually, the era’s emphasis on active engagement in society shaped the core of his poems, transforming landscape writing from a tool for seclusion to a medium for expressing lofty aspirations. Secondly, Li Bai’s landscape poems projected the Flourishing Tang Features: Grand landscape images echoed the dynasty’s vast territory and national confidence; free artistic conceptions reflected the dynasty’s cultural inclusiveness and ideological emancipation; the integration of landscapes with ideals manifested the scholars’ commitment to serving the country. Finally, the two achieved spiritual interaction: In spatial terms, the dynasty’s vast territory aligned with Li Bai’s broad spatial vision; in values, the era’s balance between engagement and freedom matched his combination of wandering and ambition; in spirit, the dynasty’s confidence resonated with his heroic and free emotions. In summary, the Flourishing Tang Features provided a creative foundation for Li Bai, while his landscape poems materialized and spread the Tang spirit, jointly forming a unique cultural legacy of the Tang Dynasty.

Reviewed by: Wrestling with Archons: Gnosticism as a Critical Theory of Culture by Jonathan Cahana-Blum Jörgen Magnusson Jonathan Cahana-Blum Wrestling with Archons: Gnosticism as a Critical Theory of Culture Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018 Pp. ix + 201. $90.00. Contrary to the current trend of dismantling Gnosticism as a category and replacing it with Christianity or biblical demiurgical traditions, Jonathan Cahana-Blum sets out to construct Gnosticism as a valid analytical category. However, he does not take as broad of an approach as Hans Jonas, who included, for instance, Manichaeism and Mandaeism (The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity [Boston: Beacon Press, 1963]). Cahana-Blum starts out with a similar set of texts to those used by Michael A. Williams, applying the criteria of biblical demiurgical tradition (Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996], 51–53). He differs from Williams, as he does not include Valentinianism in the category, holding it instead as a reform movement that is too close to the pre-orthodox church to count as Gnosticism. An interesting part of the book regards a discussion of primary and secondary sources. Normally, scholars have viewed Coptic sources as the primary ones, whereas the reports of church fathers have been considered secondary. But, Cahana-Blum turns the tables. He claims that apologetical sources are the only primary sources we have, and thus we must build upon these sources. He comes to this conclusion because he regards the Nag Hammadi sources as monastic in origin. He refers to Frederick Wisse, who suggested in the 1970s that the cartonnage of the codices indicated a monastic environment (“Gnosticism and Early Monasticism in Egypt,” in Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas, ed. Barbara Aland [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978], 436–37). Similar ideas have recently been championed by Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott, who claim that the codices were used by Pachomian monks far into the fifth century if not even later (The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015]). Cahana-Blum rightly criticizes their position, which requires a tendentious interpretation of the Nag Hammadi sources in order to make them plausible readings for Pachomian monks long after Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367. Instead, the author suggests that the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were used by former Gnostics to accommodate the orthodox church or by a Gnostic [End Page 655] sect hidden in a monastery. In either case, the texts were hidden in response to Athanasius’s Festal Letter. Nevertheless, Cahana-Blum does not regard the Nag Hammadi texts as primary Gnostic sources. Building on the monastic hypothesis, he uses examples from the Apocryphon of John, Thunder: Perfect Mind, and Zostrianos to show that the texts have undergone a masculinization. However, it seems unwarranted to rank the Greek sources of the church fathers higher than the Coptic material. In either case, one has to evaluate the reliability of each source. I would refer to both the Nag Hammadi and the apologetic sources as secondary, or preferably, rank some of the Nag Hammadi and other Coptic texts as primary, along with some of the more trustworthy accounts of the church fathers. Moreover, the monastic context of the Nag Hammadi texts has been questioned. There have been suggestions that they belonged to a private owner who was buried with the texts and that the monastic letters in the bindings of the Nag Hammadi codices might have come from a heap of scrap papyri of diverging origins. Yet another option would be to locate the texts in a Manichaean context. We now turn to what I consider the most intriguing part of the book: Gnosticism as cultural criticism. Cahana-Blum builds on Hans Jonas’s works and concludes that Gnostic ritual was a way to free the Gnostic of the dualism of the cosmic sphere. Moreover, it gives the Gnostic a view of the conditions that seem to be self-evident cosmic perspectives, but from an acosmic perspective that is open to critique. Thereby, the Gnostic can question natural conditions, such as sexual differentiation, morals, and politics (Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 277). Cahana-Blum...

Abstract: For the theater texts examined—the Corona play Lärm. Blindes sehen. Blinde sehen! , the supplementary text Was ich sagen wollte , and the dystopian trilogy Sonne / Luft / Asche —a poetics of dissolution of boundaries is constitutive in terms of content and form. It takes place on four levels: (1) between literature in a narrower, poetic sense, everyday life influenced by the media in the twenty-first century, the narratives of ancient mythology, the "myths of everyday life" and politics; (2) between genres and text forms (essay, play, ethical-political manifesto); (3) as a change of external and internal speakers and perspectives in the text; (4) in the combination of a cosmic perspective of the creation and destruction of worlds, history, politics, and the most personal feelings of grief over the loss of a loved one. This fourfold poetics of dissolution of boundaries combines aesthetic perception, social ethics, and political-feminist criticism to create an aesthetic form of resistance.