1 In IR theory, the distinction between state-moralism and cosmopolitanism has been popularised by Brown, Chris, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992)Google Scholar . In this and related works Brown has assumed that cosmopolitanism usually comes in a rather parochial form: ‘Most accounts of the universal values that might underlie a cosmopolitan ethic seem suspiciously like inadequately camouflaged versions of the first ten Amendments of the Constitution of the US of America’. Brown, Chris, ‘Cosmopolitan Confusions: A Reply to Hoffman’, Paradigms, 2:2 (1988), p. 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar , n. 2. For an analysis of how these two positions are defined negatively against each other, while circularly presupposing the other's position, see Patomäki, Heikki, ‘From Normative Utopias to Political Dialectics: Beyond a Deconstruction of the Brown-Hoffman Debate’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 21:1 (1992), pp. 53–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar . In that paper I argued, furthermore, that Hoffman's cosmopolitanism is at once too modest (it leaves many, perhaps most problems unanswered) and too strong (in some historical contexts Brown may well be right about the imperialist implications of Hoffman's view on human rights).

2 Morgenthau, Hans, Politics Among Nations. The Struggle for Power and Peace, 3rd edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1961), p. 11Google Scholar .

3 The two cosmopolitanisms are of course often intertwined. Many thinkers have oscillated between: (i) a view that justifies ‘our’ imperial interventions or expansion and, (ii) a view that denies that ‘we’ should have any specific position, rights or duties in the order, or city, of the universe. This applies of course to contemporary critical cosmopolitans as well. Even when arguing for just or democratic global institutions, cosmopolitans may still be embedded in a particular cultural and ethico-political context in a way that escapes their conscious attention. In other words, even the critical cosmopolitan sentiment may lack in self-reflexivity. For a recent attempt to carefully balance between the two distinct forms of cosmopolitanisms and elements of communitarianism or state-morality, see Erskine, Toni, Embedded Cosmopolitanism. Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of ‘Disclosed Communities’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Also in this account, however, there are others who emerge as enemies (even when seen as ‘fellow members of overlapping communities’); and thereby, the rules of just war becomes a key issue.

4 For instance, Galtung, Johan, Peace by Peaceful Means, Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization (Oslo & London: PRIO & Sage, 1996), pp. 211–222Google Scholar ; Ossio, Juan M., ‘Cosmologies’, International Social Science Journal, 49:4 (December 1997), pp. 549–562CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Martin, Denise, ‘Maat and Order in African Cosmology A Conceptual Tool for Understanding Indigenous Knowledge’, Journal of Black Studies, 38:6 (July 2008), pp. 951–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

5 From Giambattista Vico, we have learnt that myth – or cosmology in the cultural sense of the term – should not be opposed to abstract rationality or scientific truth; myths are narratives that can have truth-value and be based on the results of science, although myths themselves are not established scientific facts or theories. See Mali, Joseph, The Rehabilitation of Myth. Vico's New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For an explicit argument that modern scientific cosmology and big history of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution constitute a well-grounded and thus plausible modern creation myth, see Christian, David, ‘The Case for “Big History”’, Journal of World History, 2:2 (Fall 1991), pp. 234–238Google Scholar ; Christian, David, Maps of Time. An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 1–5, 17–38Google Scholar .

6 See, Kragh, Helge S., Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Theories of the Universe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar ; North, John, Cosmos. An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)Google Scholar ; Narlikar, Jayant V. and Burbridge, Geoffrey, Facts and Speculation in Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar .

7 Aristotle's astronomical theories were developed in his On the Heavens and to an extent in Meteorological, rather than in his famous Physics (which is about meta-physics). J. L. Stocks' translation of On the Heavens is available online at the Internet Classics Archive at: {http://www.classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/heavens.html} accessed on 20 July 2009). For a detailed account of Aristotle's cosmological system is Dreyer, J. L. E., A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, 2nd edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), pp. 108–122Google Scholar ; and also North, , Cosmos. An Illustrated History, pp. 80–84Google Scholar .

8 North, , Cosmos. An Illustrated History, pp. 82–84, 101–105, 429–431, 473–474Google Scholar ; Dreyer, , A History of Astronomy, pp. 310–412Google Scholar .

9 For relevant passages about the nature of slaves (note that for Aristotle not all actual slaves are natural slaves), women, and barbarians, and differences among these categories, see Aristotle, , Politics, trans. Howett, B. (Mineola, NY: Courier Dover Publications, 2000), pp. 1252b, 1254b, 1255b, 1260bGoogle Scholar ; and Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd edition, trans. Irwin, T. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1999), pp. 1158b, 1160b–1161b, and 1177aGoogle Scholar . For a general discussion, see McLelland, J. S., A History of Western Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 59–67Google Scholar .

10 Aristotle's perspective is in many ways structurally similar to world religions that assume a particular chosen people, or god's son, or the prophet, or anything equivalent, to have a special privileged place in the universe, that is, to constitute the ground around which everything else revolves. This explains the popularity of Aristotle among Christian and Islamic theologians. For an explanation of why Aristotle's theories did not allow him to look critically into his own conceptual metaphors and cognitive unconsciousness, see Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark, Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 373–390Google Scholar .

11 Sabine, Georg H., A History of Political Theory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 130Google Scholar , interprets the rise of Cynics as a nihilistic but critical response to the decline of the Greek city-state. Kosmopolitēs would thus be a mere negation of membership in a city-state. But Cynics remained important for centuries in the Roman Empire, and shaped both Stoicism and early Christianity.

12 The Works of Archimedes, ed. Heath, T. L. (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, Cambridge University Press Warehouse, 1897), pp. 221–222Google Scholar . Freely available at: {http://www.archive.org/details/worksofarchimede029517mbp} accessed on 15 July 2009.

13 Andrew Linklater's claim about a long-standing and unified ‘Stoic-Christian tradition’ that believes in the unity of mankind is based merely on one quotation from Sabine's dated history of Western political theory. Sabine, , A History of Political Theory, pp. 148–151Google Scholar ; Linklater, Andrew, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations, 2nd edition (London: MacMillan, 1990), p. 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; McLelland, , A History of Western Political Thought, p. 85Google Scholar , gives some support by arguing that ‘what Stoicism did was to connect the idea of individual character to the idea of cosmos ’. For an argument that Roman Stoicism did shape Kant's thinking, see Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 5:1 (1997), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

14 Hegel's famous discussion of Stoicism as ‘unhappy consciousness’ is mutatis mutandis applicable to much of classical Indian and Chinese philosophy as well. Hegel, G. W. F., The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie, J. B. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), pp. 119–130Google Scholar . Roy Bhaskar has summarised and up-dated Hegel's analysis: ‘The Stoic affects in-difference to the reality of the difference intrinsic to the power₂ relation in which she is held. The Sceptic even denies that it exists. The Unhappy Consciousness either (a) accepts the master's ideology and/or (b) compensates in a fantasy world of, for example, sport, soap or nostalgia’. Bhaskar, Roy, Plato Etc. The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution (London: Verso, 1994), p. 3Google Scholar .

15 For similarities between Confucian schools and Roman Stoicism, see Wagar, Warren W., The City of Man (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), pp. 18–22Google Scholar . For a general account of similarities, parallels and differences among the philosophies of the main hubs of the Old World, see Scharfstein, Ben-Ami, ‘Three Philosophical Civilizations: A Preliminary Comparison’, in Scharfstein, B-A. (ed.), Philosophy East Philosophy West. A Critical Comparison of Indian, Chinese, Islamic and European Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), especially pp. 118–127Google Scholar . For an interesting contrast to Scharfstein's point that explicitly political thinking was mostly lacking in India, see Amartya Sen's argument about the relevance of India's ancient culture of disputation for democractic theory, ‘Argument and History’, New Republic, 233:6 (8 August, 2005), pp. 25–32Google Scholar , and Steve Muhlberger's somewhat speculative claim that in India in the Buddhist period, 600 BCE–200 CE, republican polities were common and vigorous; ‘Democracy in Ancient India’, available at the World History of Democracy site at: {http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/h_es/h_es_muhlb_democra_frameset.htm} accessed on 8 May 2009.

16 Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation in China Volume 7. Part II: General Conclusions and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 24–35Google Scholar ; and North, , Cosmos. An Illustrated History, pp. 134–149Google Scholar .

17 As pointed out, for instance, by Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 234–235Google Scholar .

18 More interestingly, perhaps, the Confucian Golden Rule (‘what you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others’) echoes the teachings of Christianity, as do manifold debates on the real source of morality. As I have elsewhere argued, the realisation that there have been similar kinds of debates over language and reality in other times and places may also open up a more fruitful space for thinking about East and West. It is simplistic to imagine that it would be possible to synthesise either the East or the West into a coherent set of doctrines; rather there is global diversity of philosophical positions. Patomäki, Heikki, ‘From East to West. Emergent Global Philosophies – Beginnings of the End of Western Dominance?’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19:3 (2002), especially pp. 100–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

19 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Copernican Revolution. Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957)Google Scholar .

20 Cosgrove, Denis, ‘Globalism and Tolerance in Early Modern Geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93:4 (2003), pp. 852–870CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

21 ‘Men who believed that their terrestrial home was only a planet circulating blindly about one of infinity of stars evaluated their place in the cosmic scheme quite differently than had their predecessors who saw the earth as the unique and focal centre of God's creation. The Copernican Revolution was therefore also part of transition in Western man's sense of value.’ Kuhn, , The Copernican Revolution, p. 2Google Scholar . The importance of the consequences of the Copernican revolution are stressed also by Norbert Elias who distinguishes between the narrow scientific interpretation of the Copernican world-image and its impact on people's image of themselves and their place in the universe, especially in terms of emotional detachment. Elias, Norbert, Involvement and Detachment (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 68–69Google Scholar .

22 Dreyer, , A History of Astronomy, pp. 351, 410–411, 416–417Google Scholar .

23 Huygens, Christiaan, Cosmotheoros. The Celestial Worlds Discover'd: or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets, trans. unknown (London: Timothy Childe, 1698)Google Scholar . Available at: {http://www.phys.uu.nl/~huygens/cosmotheoros_en.htm} accessed on 17 June 2008.

24 Voltaire, , Micromégas. Histoire Philosophique (Paris: Firmin Didot, orig. probably 1752Google Scholar , but the precise date of publication uncertain). Available HTTP in French with the 1829 preface by Beuchot at the project Guthenberg {http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/mcrmg10.txt} and an English edition revised by Blake Linton Wilfong {http://www.wondersmith.com/scifi/micro.htm] accessed on 22 September 2008. The tradition of science fiction novels that use a human from an alien culture or an alien stranded on Earth as a device for critiquing various aspects of society has continued since Voltaire, and Montesquieu, and Jonathan Swift. For social scientists, an especially interesting example is the humorous sci-fi book by the well-known socialist historian, social theorist and peace campaigner Thompson, E. P., The Sykaos Papers (London: Bloomsbury, 1988)Google Scholar .

25 Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 24–27Google Scholar .

26 Kant, Immanuel, Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven, trans. Johnston, I.Google Scholar (Based on Georg Reimer's 1905 edition of the complete works of Immanuel Kant, orig. published 1755). Available at: {http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kant/kant2e.htm} accessed on 12 August 2008.

27 For a detailed account of Wright's and Kant's contribution to our understanding of the Milky Way as a galaxy of stars, see North, , Cosmos. An Illustrated History, pp. 444–449Google Scholar .

28 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Abbott, T. K., in Great Books of the Western World 42. Kant (London: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1952Google Scholar ; orig. published 1788), p. 360.

29 Ibid., pp. 360–1.

30 Ibid., pp. 361.

31 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’ (1784) and ‘On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory But Is of No Practical Use’ (1793), in Kant, Immanuel, Perpetual Peace and Other Essay, trans. Humphrey, T. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1988), pp. 29–40, 61–92Google Scholar . For an illuminating discussion, see O'Neill, Onora, ‘Historical Trends and Human Futures’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 39:4 (December 2008), pp. 529–534CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

32 Kant's categorical imperative is critical of all forms of ego-centrism and thus treats ego and alter in strictly similar terms. Arguably, however, it still represents inadequate ethico-political learning because it cannot imagine others as different from oneself and sees no need for a democratic dialogue with concrete others. See Kohlberg, Lawrence, ‘The Claim to Moral Adequacy of a Highest Stage of Moral Judgment’, Journal of Philosophy, 70:18 (1973), pp. 630–646CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussions Concerning “Stage 6”’, in Kelly, M. (ed.), Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 32–52Google Scholar . Habermas' criticism of Kant's and Rawls' monological reasoning is in important ways similar to Jacques Derrida's discussion of the universal in terms of exemplarity that always inscribes the universal in the proper body of singularity and particularity, in Derrida, Jacques, The Other Heading. Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Brault, P-A. & Naas, M. (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992)Google Scholar .

33 This was of course ambiguous. A good example is the 1792 trial of Louis XVI, where the Jacobins, still in fear of the king's mystical persona, wanted to move quickly to execution, whereas the de facto more revolutionary Girondins were in favour of using legalistic method and argued that Louis was a citizen subject to ordinary justice. How, Alan R., ‘Habermas, History and Social Evolution: Moral Learning and the Trial of Louis XVI’, Sociology, 35:1 (2001), pp. 177–194CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

34 Hedley Bull, for instance, is sometimes read as suggesting that Kant was making an argument for an arrangement that in effect comes close to a world state, but also Bull clarifies that in Perpetual Peace Kant in fact turned to ‘the negative surrogate of a league of republican or constitutional states’. Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society, A Study of Order in World Politics (London: MacMillan, 1977), p. 244Google Scholar .

35 See, Patomäki, Heikki and Steger, Manfred S., ‘Social Imaginaries and Big History: Towards a New Planetary Consciousness?’, Futures, 41 (2009)Google Scholar .

36 Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich, The Ideal of Humanity and Universal Federation, trans. Hastie, W. (LLC: BiblioBazaar, 2009), p. 105Google Scholar .

37 Cole, Juan R. I., Modernity & the Millennium. The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the Nineteenth Century Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar , especially chap. 4.

38 A number of Bahá'u'lláh's sermon-like texts are available in English at: {http://www.bahaullah.com/} and {http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/b#a6767} accessed on 2 July 2009.

39 Yu-Wei, K'Ang, Ta T'Ung Shu. The One-World Philosophy of K'Ang Yu-Wei, trans. and introduced by Thompson, L. G. (London: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar ; first published in Chinese partly in 1913 and fully in 1935; in English in 1958.

40 Ibid., p. 107.

41 Ibid., p. 122.

42 Ibid., p. 107.

43 Pardo's concept was embodied in the now ratified Law of the Sea Treaty. In the Preamble of the 1982 UN Convention for the Law of the Saw, it is stated: ‘Desiring by this Convention to develop the principles embodied in resolution 2749 (XXV) of 17 December 1970 in which the General Assembly of the UN solemnly declared inter alia that the area of the seabed and ocean floor and the subsoil thereof, beyond the limits of national jurisdiction, as well as its resources, are the common heritage of mankind, the exploration and exploitation of which shall be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole, irrespective of the geographical location of States.’

44 Yu-wei, K'ang, Ta T'Ung Shu, p. 109Google Scholar .

45 Wagar, Warren W., The City of Man, p. 52Google Scholar , commented in 1963: ‘K'ang's vision of world order may seem nightmarish in Western liberal eyes, but much of the Chinese way of life since 1950 under communist rule bears a startling, even a disquieting, resemblance.’ Ironically, Wagar's own later scenario about a socialist democratic world state that would be established in the 2060s is not so dissimilar from K'ang's vision, yet appears as much less nightmarish – and in some ways even utopian – in his story, although it eventually collapses because of its inflexible bureaucracy and bigness. Wagar, Warren. W., A Short History of the Future, 3rd edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar .

46 Yu-wei, K'ang, Ta T'Ung Shu, p. 64Google Scholar .

47 Ibid., pp. 66–7. K'ang refers to an experience of actually seeing the stars and (probably also) our planet from the outside. He may have interpreted this as a mystical experience, but in fact there are many pre-space age descriptions of how moons, planets and stars look from the space. The Copernican perspective and knowledge of the cosmic dimensions and relations enabled human imagination to envisage how things look from a cosmic viewpoint long before outer space photographs. See Cosgrove, Ddenis, ‘Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84:2, (1994), especially pp. 272–273CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

48 In many of writings, Wells stressed that a world state does not have to resemble existing territorial states. Often Wells had in mind functionalist systems of global governance rather than a centralised state, although a key point was to transfer the legitimate monopoly of violence to a world body. For a good analytical discussion on Wells' political theory, see Partington, John S., Building Cosmopolis. The Political Thought of H. G. Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)Google Scholar .

49 All of these books are easily available in several different editions; moreover, they are in the public domain and can be freely accessed at: {http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/w#a30} accessed on 17 June 2009.

50 The story was an ambiguously ironic reversal of the fate of Tasmanians in the hands of the British colonialists. While the British were kind of Martians and Earthlings Tasmanians, in Wells' story viruses kill the ‘British’, not those being colonised. And yet there were elements of simplistic Manichean thinking in the story (the Martians as ‘others’). For a discussion of the moral of the story, see Wagar, Warren W., H. G. Wells. Traversing Time (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), pp. 54–58Google Scholar .

51 Wells, H. G., Anticipations Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902)Google Scholar , available at: {http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19229}.

52 Wells, H. G., (The New and Revised) Outline of History. Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Company, 1931), p. 1157Google Scholar . The first edition was published in 1920; all together the book sold over two million copies. Characteristically, Wells explained in the revised edition that ‘The Outline of History the writer would far prefer to his own would be the Outline of 2031; to read it and, perhaps with even more curiosity, to pour over its illustrations’; ibid., p. 6.

53 In the early stories, evolution is seen as possibly implying the degeneration of the human species; the ultimate fate of the solar system is death as the sun becomes a red giant; and monsters, aliens and mad scientists run amok against the humanity. A gloomy section from the 11th chapter of the serial version of The Time Machine published in New Review (May 1895) was deleted from the book. This section, ‘The Grey Man’, is available at: {http://www.en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Grey_Man}.

54 Wells, H. G., Mind at the End of Its Tether (London: William Heinemann, 1945), p. 5Google Scholar .

55 For an alternative account of the logic of science and scientific experimentation, see Bhaskar, Roy, A Realist Theory of Science (London: Verso, 1975)Google Scholar .

56 According to a common interpretation, Hume mounted a sceptical attack on all forms of design arguments and teleological reasoning, in effect denying that the universe would have any meaning or purpose whatever; it just happens to be; see, for example, Barrow, John D. and Tipler, Frank J., The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 69–72Google Scholar . However, Hume was not consistent on his attitude towards objective morality or religion and also wrote things like ‘the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author’; quoted in Gaskin, J. C. A., ‘Hume on Religion’, in Norton, D. F. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambidge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 320Google Scholar . Although the fear of censorship and consequences might have made Hume write contradictory statements, it seems clear that as a consistent sceptic Hume was unable and unwilling to deny the existence of God. It should be noted that for the same reason he was far less opposed to causal realism than what is often thought (for a provocative discussion of Hume as a causal realist, see Wright, John P., ‘Hume's Causal Realism. Recovering a Traditional Interpretation’, in Read, R. and Richman, K. A. (ed.), The New Hume Debate. A Revised Edition (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 88–99Google Scholar .

57 For a detailed analytical overview of Nietzsche's three phases and his diverse and ambivalent pursuits, see Clark, Maudemarie, ‘Nietzsche, Friedrich’, in Craig, E. (ed.), The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 726–741Google Scholar .

58 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, trans. Kauffman, W. and Hollingdale, R. J. (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 3Google Scholar .

59 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1961), p. 14Google Scholar .

60 Turnbull, Neil, ‘The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus. Global Being in the Planetary World’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23:1 (2006), pp. 125–139CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

61 The originators of marginalism tended to have progressivist ethico-political ideas, but the implicit Humean scepticism of neo-classical economics started to take over in the 20th century. See Milja Kurki, Jamie Morgan and Heikki Patomäki, ‘Towards a New Political Economy: A Critical Dialogue with Léon Walras and Alfred Marshall’, a paper in progress.

62 See ‘To My English Readers’ and ‘Introduction: Today’, in Althusses, Louis, For Marx, trans. Brewster, B. (London: Verso, 1969), pp. 9–15, 21–39Google Scholar .

63 Five years after killing his wife, Althusser wrote his memoirs where he repeats, in a Freudian language, many of the points made by Nietzsche. ‘Does one have to point out that, in addition to the three great narcissistic wounds inflicted on Humanity (that of Galileo, that of Darwin, and that of the unconscious), there is a fourth and ever graver one which no one wishes to have revealed (since from the time immemorial the family has been the very site of the sacred and therefore of power and of religion). It is an irrefutable fact that the Family is the most powerful ideological State apparatus.’ Althusser, Louis, The Future Lasts Forever. A Memoir, trans. Veasey, R. (New York: The New Press, 1993)Google Scholar . In many ways, these memoirs constitute a tragic story of modern Europe in 1914–1989.

64 Turnbull, ‘The Ontological Consequences’, pp. 135–7; see also, Steger, Manfred B., The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar .

65 This is too vast an issue to even try to list relevant references, but it consists of two parts: quantum mechanics and cosmic evolution. Quantum mechanics implies that either reality is somehow dependent on consciousness, or that the universe is intra-connected way beyond the confines of local causality. Cosmic evolution, in turn, re-raises the question of formal and teleological causality. For a tentative discussion on both issues, see Patomäki, Heikki, ‘After Critical Realism? The Relevance of Contemporary Science’, Journal of Critical Realism, 9:1 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

66 Dicke, Robert, ‘Dirac's Cosmology and Mach's Principle’, Nature, 192 (1961), pp. 440–441CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

67 Carter, Brandon, ‘Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology’, in Longair, M. S. (ed.), Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data (International Astronomical Union, 1974), p. 291CrossRefGoogle Scholar , available at: {http://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1974IAUS...63..291} accessed on 14 March 2008.

68 Ibid., p. 294. The most thorough analysis of different versions of the anthropic principle is Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. See also the very different accounts of Chaisson, Eric J., Cosmic Evolution. The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar ; Gardner, James N., Biocosm. The New Scientific Theory of the Universe: Intelligent Life is the Architect of the Universe (Inner Ocean: Makawao, 2003)Google Scholar ; Davies, Paul, The Goldilock's Enigma. Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (London: Allen Lane, 2006)Google Scholar ; and Klapwijk, Jacob, Purpose in the Living World. Creation and Emergent Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

69 This is the project of Primack, Joel and Abrams, Nancy Ellen, The View from the Centre of the Universe. Discovering our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (London: Fourth Estate, 2006)Google Scholar ; and, from a rather different but parallel perspective, Jennifer Gidley, ‘Spiritual Epistemologies and Integral Cosmologies: Transforming Thinking and Culture’. In Awbrey, S., Dana, D., Miller, V., Robinson, P., Ryan, M. M. & Scott, D. K. (eds), Integrative Learning and Action: A Call to Wholeness. Vol. 3 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), pp. 29–55Google Scholar .

70 Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press [World's Classics], 1998, originally published in 1859), p. 7Google Scholar .

71 This is one of the numerous points made by Ervin Laszlo in favour of what he calls an ‘integral’ cosmology; Laszlo, Ervin, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos. The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006), pp. 16–17Google Scholar .

72 Kauffman, Stuart, At Home in the Universe. The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar ; Kauffman, Stuart, Investigations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar .

73 For a full, critical discussion of this and related ideas, see Heikki Patomäki, ‘After Critical Realism?’, and my rejoinder to Nick Hostettler in the same issue of the Journal of Critical Realism. Furthermore, in Global Futures. On the Temporality of the Human Condition, a book in progress, I explore and develop the idea of Vicoan and Gramscian re-appropriation of myth for re-constructive purposes from a critical, scientific realist perspective.