ABSTRACT
Cosmological speculation and natural philosophy were born in the same gesture: Thaies and his Milesian colleagues’ naturalistic hypotheses about the nature and structure of the universe around them. During the more than two and a half millennia since these sixth-century-B.C. beginnings, cosmological thought and natural philosophy have been inextricably interwoven, with admixtures, from time to time, of varying degrees of empirical and theoretical astronomy, coupled almost always to attempts to mathematicize the entire process. Three flourishings—ancient, classical, and modern—may be easily identified; equally identifiable at the beginning of each period of flourishing is the emergence of a recognizable philosophy of science, the result of vigorous discussion among the initiators of the new epoch of cosmologizing. In each era, both the details of the science and the nature of the science itself were shaped by the new consensus about the science’s underlying philosophy.
