This chapter is a broad outline of the timeline of the Big Bang and the formation of the universe and solar system. It discusses the relationship between energy and matter, and how elements are formed from simpler elements due to the application of energy and gravity. This chapter emphasizes the large scales of time and space, and also how energy and matter are distributed across the vastness of universe. Finally, it discusses our solar system and similarities to other distant solar systems with planets in the ‘habitable zones’, and the potential for life outside Earth.

The introduction presents the nature and scope of De mundo and explains the objectives of the present volume. De mundo is a protreptic work aiming to present philosophy as a study of the universe and its relation to God. For that reason, it sets out to explain the world in terms of what makes it an orderly arrangement, a kosmos. The work’s central thesis is that the orderly arrangement of the universe is due to God and that it is hence crucial to have a proper conception of God and his causal relation to the universe in order to fully appreciate the universe, its structure and the phenomena that occur in it. Unlike most scholarly work done on this text, the present volume does not focus on the question of authenticity and dating, but on its content and philosophy. However, the introduction does explain at some length why De mundo should not be ascribed to Aristotle, although the author clearly aimed to present a picture of the world and God that is essentially Aristotelian. The introduction is accompanied by an overview of the argument presented in De mundo.

Chapter 17 sets out the historical factors behind the differing conceptions in India and Greece of the interrelation of universe with inner self and the absence from Greece of karma.

Though Chaucer seems to have matriculated at neither of England’s medieval universities, his acquaintance with philosophical ideas of the classical and medieval traditions is strikingly evident in his writings. He also had friends at the University of Oxford, including the ‘philosophical’ Strode to whom he dedicates Troilus and Criseyde. His principal textual authority was Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, but he also drew on the works of the Neoplatonic poets Alan of Lille and Bernard Silvester. The philosophical themes explored by these writers, which range from the origin and ordering of the universe to the function of nature and the relationship between fate and free will, are addressed in different ways in his literary narratives, perhaps most subtly and successfully in Troilus and Criseyde. Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, on which the narrator dwells at the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls, was known to Chaucer through the commentary on this text produced by Macrobius, which itself supplied the classification of dreams that confounds the narrator of the House of Fame, and to which Pertelote wisely appeals in the interpretation of his own prophetic dream in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Though not typically remembered as a philosopher, Chaucer was certainly a philosophical poet.

Chaucer lived in a society that was aware of childhood and adolescence as distinctive stages of human life and which inherited practices whereby young people were brought up and trained for adulthood. Informally, at home, children were introduced to social norms, religion and work. Those from wealthier families underwent more formal education, mastering literacy at home, in schools or in great households, where they learnt reading, rules of courtesy, French and, in the case of some boys, Latin. Chaucer’s works refer in passing to most of these processes, with particular attention to adolescents, including university scholars. During the fifteenth century his works in general came to be seen as having educational value. The Astrolabe, first written for his son Lewis, seems to have been used for teaching reading to other young children while his major writings were recommended as suitable literature for older ones.

Chaucer’s universe was an interconnected system, in which all things had their divinely ordered place. This chapter explores the sources and status of natural knowledge in the later Middle Ages, and Chaucer’s employment of that knowledge for poetic and didactic purposes. It explains how medieval philosophers used their inheritance of classical and Islamic knowledge, refining an understanding of a harmonious cosmos through the sciences of astronomy, cosmology, music and medicine. These were not just theoretical sciences, but practical arts. Chaucer understood, and explained, the astrological workings of tables and instruments and their predictive power for meteorology and medicine. He never let technicalities overwhelm poetry, but it is clear that the sciences were of great interest to Chaucer. They were worthy of serious study both for their practical potential and their philosophical or ethical implications, and a field in which, through his Treatise on the Astrolabe, Chaucer made his own unique contribution.

The concept of kosmos did not play the leading role in Aristotle’s physics that it did in Pythagorean, Atomistic, Platonic, or Stoic physics. Although Aristotle greatly influenced the history of cosmology, he does not himself recognize a science of cosmology, a science taking the kosmos itself as the object of study with its own phenomena to be explained and its own principles that explain them. The term kosmos played an important role in two aspects of his predecessor’s accounts that Aristotle rejected: first, cosmogony and kosmopoiia, generation or creation of the kosmos; second, diakosmêsis, arranging of a plurality of kosmoi. Aristotle was extremely critical of accounts involving kosmopoiia and diakosmêsis and developed general dialectical strategies against them. In emphatically distinguishing his view from all his predecessors' (including Plato), he uses the terms ho ouranos (the heaven), to holon (the whole) and to pan (the totality) in preference to ho kosmos (the kosmos or world). There is usually no harm in speaking loosely of ‘Aristotle’s cosmology’ when referring to his concept of the order of nature and the ouranos. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s theoretical philosophy offers something very different from those of his predecessors, for whom kosmos was a keyword.