World enough and form

The following is the abstract from an essay of mine recently submitted for review. If you would like a personal copy of the final draft, please contact me. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This essay proposes a comprehensive blueprint for the hylomorphic foundations of cosmology. The key philosophical explananda in cosmology are those dealing with global regularities and structures, the regularity of global regularities, and the existence of the global as such. The possibility of accounting for them through alternatives to hylomorphism is briefly considered: the regularity theory of the laws of nature, nomic necessitarianism, monism, and the new Heracliteanism of Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin. These alternatives fail to meet the cosmological explananda simultaneously. Hylomorphism provides a sound philosophy of cosmology insofar as it supports a notion of cosmic essence, the unity of complex essences, and globally emergent properties. These are used to account for seven specific cosmological explananda and to resolve two problems in the philosophy of cosmology, namely, the meta-law dilemma and the uniqueness of the universe. Cosmology needs hylomorphism because it is able to ground cosmology’s efforts as a scientific inquiry. It can so this because hylomorphism philosophically accounts for changing substances and aggregates of substances, the various scales of law-governed behavior measured by the natures of those substances, and how those substances as parts relate to the universe as a whole.