Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy

Kōhei Saitō’s Ecological Marxism and Degrowth Communism

Toni Ruuska — 2026-07-02

While editing and studying Marx’s excerpts and notes of 1864-1872, which were published in 2019 as part of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²), Kōhei Saitō found the ‘last Marx’. From these notes Saitō has produced novel pathways to contemporary readings of Marx in the form of two scholarly works and a political manifesto articulating an evolution in late Marx of the rudiments of what he calls ‘degrowth communism’. This extensive review article reconstructs Saitō’s position across his published work, paying particular attention to the rich and diverse contexts from which Saitō develops his non-productivist eco-Marxism and eco-communist politics. We deal firstly with Saitō’s method and theoretical construction of concepts such as metabolism and the human-nature dualism, while remaining puzzled by his attempt to exorcise philosophy from Marx. Secondly, we celebrate Saitō’s politics, while arguing that degrowth communism is more material, more real, and more revolutionary than he admits. In any case, Saitō has done an invaluable service by meticulously revisiting the writings of Marx and others, and in doing so opening new and important ways to combine ecology, degrowth, and communism.

Book Review: The Theoretical Uncertainty of Nature in Badiou’s Méditation sur le concept de nature

Constanza Filloy — 2026-07-02

This review examines Alain Badiou’s Méditation sur le concept de nature, focusing on his analysis of nature’s conceptual instability. Badiou’s dialectical analysis of nature and his discussion of Kant and Hegel on nature as totality offer valuable resources for a systematic framing of the problem. However, his refusal of the concept of nature in this volume demands closer scrutiny. I suggest that rather than becoming obsolescent, the instability in the concept of nature persists in contemporary scientific, artistic, and political contexts. Indeed, the concept of nature remains open to its uncertainty between natural history and human action and thus cannot be reduced to a mere negativity.

Thinking with Thucydides on Climate Change Geopolitics

Nathan Dinneen — 2026-07-02

This article uses Thucydides to frame the Anthropocene as “the greatest motion” in order to consider the magnitude and urgency of climate change for thinking about geopolitics today. His Melian Dialogue, the debate between the Athenians and the Melians over the neutrality of the island of Melos, is revisited with a mind to consider the plight of low-lying island states in a time of climate change and the unwillingness of great powers, like China and the United States, to act in accordance with the climate justice standard of keeping temperatures from rising 1.5°C above the preindustrial average. With climate justice appeals failing to convince great powers in their actions, this article raises the prospect of how interest-based reasoning could align itself with appeals to justice, with the intent of overcoming indifference toward the plight of the inhabitants of low-lying island states. The key is to move great powers in the direction of taking an active interest in upholding their climate pledges so that they do not ring hollow. Recalling Thucydides’ placement of the Melian Dialogue before the disastrous Athenian-led Sicilian expedition could serve as a cautionary tale for great powers in the context of climate change geopolitics.

Crisis of Consciousness:

Feng Lin — 2026-07-02

In the contemporary era of deep technological penetration, human consciousness is facing an unprecedented confluence of crisis and possibility. Departing from traditional transcendentalist and naturalist paradigms of consciousness research, this paper proposes a “structural-phenomenological method” and, from an ontological perspective, defines consciousness as a structural apparatus operating between “crisis” and “possibility.” Based on a deficiency theory of human nature—according to which humans exist as innately incomplete, disease-living beings—consciousness is neither a transcendental illumination nor a mere mental function, but a dynamic compensatory mechanism forced into being by crisis, continuously reinforcing its own crises and possibilities through a positive feedback loop. Self-consciousness is then regarded as a secondary “pseudo-center” that emerges from the failure of conscious operations, possessing a dialectical structure of forgetting and recollection. Facing the contemporary predicament in which technology infinitely amplifies both possibility and crisis, the way out for consciousness lies not in unlimited expansion but in learning self-limitation. The paper ultimately reflects on the mode of existence of modern human beings and reaffirms the philosophical mission of “know thyself.”

Beyond the Will to Power:

Denis Ushakov — 2026-07-02

This article proposes a performative turn in interpreting Friedrich Nietzsche. It argues that tensions in his thought—between systematicity and fragmentation, critique and creation—are not mere contradictions but symptoms of an aporia inherent in grounding ontology in the will to power. Through immanent critique, the analysis exposes the will to power's logical vulnerabilities: its tautological structure, unfalsifiable status, and conflict between ateleological becoming and expansion. The article traces how these aporias replicate at the epistemological and axiological levels when applied reflexively, generating crises of self-reference in perspectivism and value foundation. The central argument, however, is that this impasse is not failure but catalyst for hermeneutic recalibration. It composes recognition that Nietzsche's philosophy operates as performative act rather than coherent doctrine. His agonistic writing, philosophy as life-creation, and biographical trajectory—culminating in mental collapse—are analyzed not as external illustrations but as the medium enacting philosophical content. Thus, moving beyond the will to power means interpreting Nietzsche's work as a performance staging the aporia it cannot resolve, transforming impasse into distinctive philosophical practice.

I Am Not (Alone):

John Wayne Rosson — 2026-07-02

This essay challenges the widespread assumption that Hannah Arendt’s concept of political action precludes meaningful solitude. Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of irony, I argue that action, in Arendt’s sense, requires not only plurality but also a preparatory solitude grounded in ironic distance. I suggest that both Kierkegaard’s anxiety-ridden subject and Arendt’s public actor share a natal stance toward the world—one that resists conformism and opens a space for genuine appearance. By placing Arendt in conversation with Kierkegaard, I recover an ironic, natal dimension within her vita activa—a mode of inwardness often eclipsed in dominant interpretations of her work. Rather than signaling a withdrawal from the public realm, this inwardness forms the hidden ground upon which meaningful political association becomes possible.

Bringing Arendt and Kierkegaard into dialogue—a pairing rarely made—reveals affinities deeper than typically recognized. Despite their temperamental differences, both exhibit a sustained attentiveness to the nature of disclosure. For Arendt, to act is to begin—to introduce the new into the world through speech and deed. For Kierkegaard, to live ironically is to hold one’s identity at a slant: to resist the given, to refuse the merely inherited. Both involve risk. Both expose the individual (though in different ways and directions).[1] And both, crucially, are rooted in natality: the idea that one can begin anew, not from mastery, but from finitude.[2]

Kierkegaard’s account of irony, especially as developed in The Concept of Irony, articulates a form of solitude that is neither resignation nor quietism, but rather a posture of critical distance from inherited identities and unexamined social roles. The ironist stands apart—not in apathy, but in anticipation. This inward estrangement is not yet action, but it is what makes action possible. It is, as Kierkegaard might suggest, a form of pre-political becoming: a stripping away of the conventional that prepares the self for authentic self-disclosure. In this sense, irony becomes natal solitude—a space where the self is both unsettled and readied for emergence. When read alongside Arendt, Kierkegaard’s ironic inwardness appears not as the antithesis of political action, but as its condition: the space where a self first gathers sufficient freedom to appear meaningfully before others.

[1] Closer phenomenological inspection (begun here) suggests that this appearance of “differing direction” is no less superficial than the oft-assumed lack of affinity between Arendt and Kierkegaard.

[2] Their apparent difference turns not on any ontic essence but on temporal emphasis. This essay aims to open space in which Arendtian natality and Kierkegaardian irony both appear as the creative ground where something new begins. The publicness and exteriority of Arendt’s vita activa is found in her deliberate emphasis of this aspect of being human in The Human Condition. Whereas Kierkegaard’s treatment deals more specifically with the conditions for the existential move he makes in The Concept of Irony. They are not two distinct descriptions of two different people, but two possible stages of being that could happen in one body at one time, many bodies at different times or even in one body at different times over time.

Proposal of Creatio ex Pleno:

Sommer Billingsley — 2026-07-02

My paper advances the Proposal of Creatio ex Pleno—creation out of fullness—as an alternative to the traditional creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of nothing”) and creatio ex materia (“creation out of matter”). In this model, “nothing” is not absence but the undifferentiated fullness—structured potential—from which all distinctions arise. One might picture it as a block of marble containing every possible sculpture, though none yet revealed: all forms latent, none yet chosen.

Drawing from theology, philosophy, physics, linguistics, and cognitive science, it reframes “nothing” as the pre-named totality that underlies being, thought, and perception.

In the Hebrew Genesis narrative, creation begins not ex nihilo but through the ordering of pre-existent waters (tehom) by naming (King 1902). In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ declaration “I know nothing” mirrors this stance, reflecting direct acquaintance with pre-conceptual reality (Plato 2000). Modern physics reveals the vacuum as a field of latent energy (Davies 2006; Krauss 2012); linguistics shows that naming shapes perception (Whorf 1956); neuroscience confirms that awareness precedes categorization (McGilchrist 2009). True wisdom lies in sustained recognition of this inexhaustible whole—knowing “nothing” as the deepest form of knowledge.

Infoautopoiesis and Undecidability:

Jaime F. Cárdenas-García — 2026-07-02

Artifact-making is central to human existence. The mid-twentieth century inaugurated what is popularly referred to as the 'Information Age', coinciding with the introduction of digital computers. The extraordinary growth of computer technology and the burgeoning of AI systems has triggered an active debate about the potential capabilities and limits of these supposed living creations, which now include extraordinary claims of imminent AI consciousness. A productive focus on this contentious issue requires an understanding of the exact characteristics of information in living systems, how these pertain to our human artifacts, and, correspondingly, to the limits of our artifact-making ability. The critical foundation of a correct assessment must be centered within the living context of an organism in its environment and how organisms recognize sensorial signals, so as to internally analyze and create information. That discussion directly relates to the distinctions between syntactic and semantic information and their dynamic interrelationship. Information assessment in the living frame is a recursive process, forming a continuously self-reinforcing sensation-information-action cycle that serves as the basis for the infoautopoietic self-production of information by living beings. Examining these processes reveals inherent limits to human artifact-making, governed by principles of uncomputability and undecidability inherent to the living information cycle.

The Synthetic Public

Konstantin Feofanov — 2026-07-02

The article examines the emergence of “synthetic public” caused by the proliferation of network technologies, highlighting the resultant threats to epistemic agency and democratic deliberation. Key areas of analysis include simulation mechanisms, how public opinion is artificially manufactured, theory of deliberative democracy as the foundation of democratic political discourse, deliberation and simulation as opposing political tendencies, social epistemology as a normative analysis of ways to organize political discourse, the erosion and collapse of epistemic activity, and elections, which blur the dichotomy between “organic” public opinion and technologically mediated content. The article concludes that the synthetic public is not a step toward true democracy, but a harmful way to imitate and circumvent it. Finally, the article asserts the urgent need to safeguard citizens’ epistemic autonomy in the age of Large Language Models (LLMs).

Political Roots of Economic Crisis

Carmine Gorga — 2026-07-02

The roots of the current crisis in economics must be found in politics rather than economics. The world of economics is in fact divided according to political lines: Individualists v. Collectivists; Capitalists v. Socialist/Communists; believers in The Market v. believers in The Government. This divide is very old. It was created by John Locke’s pursuit of the justice of property rights. Socialists and Karl Marx insisted on the injustice of property rights.The brightest minds of many ages have been unable to resolve the crisis. Why hope in future solutions along these lines? This paper looks at what existed before John Locke, finds there the ancient but fertile field of economic justice, and with the help of Concordian economics completes the structure of economic justice by adding to it the plank of participative justice. The Theory of Economic Justice becomes very concrete by applying it to the four factors of (modern) production and recognizing, accordingly, four economic rights, which are indissolubly tied to four economic responsibilities. These four fields, going forward, give rise to four Concordian policies, namely fiscal policies, labor policies, monetary policies, and industrial policies. It is by implementing these four policies that the current crisis will be resolved. Accordingly, the world will be unified along the arc of Individualists, Collectivists, and Somists (men and women in the social context) as well as Capitalists, Socialists, and Concordians.

The Human Existence: Forms, Content, and Hopes

Dadir Goshaev — 2026-07-02

The article presents a transdisciplinary study of human societal development, viewed through the lens of social thermodynamics and historical cyclicity.

When the Part Betrays the Whole

Heng Xie — 2026-07-02

This paper delineates a unified theoretical framework for civilizational collapse by conceptualizing decline as a structural “betrayal of the whole by the part.” Moving beyond the traditional dichoto of environmental determinism and aggregative eclecticism, the study anchors the logic of collapse in Multilevel Selection (MLS) theory. It posits that civilizations operate as high-level complex organisms that inevitably encounter “subsystem carcinogenesis”, a systemic dynamic wherein localized entities, such as predatory elites, self-referential bureaucracies, or decoupled markets, maximize their own fitness at the expense of the societal totality. By scrutinizing the developmental trajectories of Modern Europe, Greco-Roman antiquity, and Classical China, the research demonstrates how the “Great Dis-embedding” of these subsystems leads to an endogenous exhaustion of both moral and material reservoirs. This framework suggests that civilizational collapse is not a contingent historical accident but a deterministic evolutionary-physical process, structurally isomorphic to the self-destruction of malignant neoplasms within biological hosts. Ultimately, the paper bridges the gap between classical historiography and contemporary complexity science, framing the fall of civilizations as a terminal manifestation of between-levels conflict ubiquitous across the cosmological scale.

What Should Critique Do? On the Three Interpretations of Transcendental Philosophy

Paweł Korzeb — 2026-07-02

This paper examines three main ways of interpreting transcendental philosophy—metaphysical, psychological and epistemological—to investigate their significance for contemporary thought. I aim to show that different views of critical philosophy depend on how the ontological status of the transcendental conditions of possible experience is determined. In metaphysical interpretations, the transcendental refers to the metaphysical sphere of becoming or manifestation constituted by the activity of the subject or nature; in psychological ones, to the functions, capacities and faculties of the mind; and in epistemological ones, to the necessary norms or principles of scientific knowledge. The three interpretations oscillate between two models of critique, reflected in two naval metaphors that Kant used to illustrate his philosophy. In the model of the island of certainty, critical philosophy searches for necessary and immutable conditions of objects, functions of the mind or norms of rationality. In the model of navigation of the uncertain sea, critical philosophy aims to orient thinking to avoid extremes of dogmatism and scepticism. I will argue that since the concept of conditions of experience was subject to objections proving their contingency and revisability, the model of the island of certainty is untenable. However, the transcendental method could help us avoid dogmatism and scepticism in our approach to metaphysical discourse, cognitive science and the implications of scientific discourse for our self-understanding. In short, the aim of transcendental philosophy is to navigate the changing meanings of the ideas of metaphysical ground, mind and rationality.

From Struggle for Existence to Autotelic Joy – A Concept of Life for the Anthropocene

Markus Lindholm — 2026-07-02

This article develops a concept of life adequate to the Anthropocene, by tracing the historical shift from life understood as a matter of survival under external selection pressures, to self-realizing activity. By following the divergence between continental and British traditions after Malthus and Darwin, we argue that the functionalist understanding obscured essential features of living systems. Drawing on Albert Schweitzer’s ethics of reverence for life, Hans Jonas’s phenomenology of biological temporality, and recent work on autopoiesis, interoception and agency, the article advances a concept of life as intrinsically unfinished and future-oriented. Our perspective let time emerge as an inherent biological agent. Life is characterized not merely by survival, but by self-maintaining agency, temporal openness, and surplus capacities that manifest as autotelic joy. Studies on animal behavior support the claim that joy is not an epiphenomenon but possibly also a pervasive biological factor. The article concludes that the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene is rooted in an instrumentalized concept of life, and that responding to it requires a philosophy that recognizes living beings as processual, relational, and ethically significant.

The Metaqualia Structure of Consciousness:

Minoru Matsui — 2026-07-02

The Metaqualia framework, abbreviated as MTQ, is a proposed structural account of consciousness organized around three elements: Q, M, and T. Q denotes qualia, the qualitative contents of experience; M denotes metaqualia, the interpretive configurations that organize qualia into coherent meaning; and T denotes transformative operations or transition fields, the processes through which such configurations are selected, modified, and stabilized across contexts. Although MTQ has often been referred to as Metaqualia Theory, this paper does not assume in advance that it is a theory in the strict epistemological sense. Rather, it asks what kind of epistemic object MTQ is: a conjecture, a theory, a model, a frame, or a stratified combination of these. I argue that MTQ has a layered epistemic identity. It begins as a set of testable conjectures, develops into a systematic account of conscious organization, takes shape as a structural model, and functions as an interpretive frame for rethinking mental phenomena. This classification does not weaken MTQ’s status. Instead, it clarifies how a single framework can operate across empirical, philosophical, clinical, and interdisciplinary contexts while remaining open to critique and revision.

Process, Constraint, and Consciousness in a Self-Organising Cosmos

Nobuyuki Otsubo — 2026-07-02

Modern science often treats matter, life, and consciousness as separate domains. Taking Whitehead's process philosophy as its central framework, and drawing on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, complexity science, and consciousness studies, this paper develops CAT (Cosmic Architecture Theory) as a natural-philosophical research programme. Its central schema describes the relation between multi-scale constraint architecture (A) and embedded local modes (mu), together with a cross-scale embedding relation through which local modes at one scale participate in the constraint environment of the next. CAT proposes that matter, life, and consciousness can be understood as phases of a single processual continuum, and it formulates the bridge from complex organisation to experience as an explicit speculative principle rather than leaving it implicit. It also reinterprets Godelian undecidability and computational irreducibility, not as deductions, but as considerations within an inference to the best explanation bearing on ontological openness. CAT is presented as a Lakatosian research programme with specified empirical contact surfaces and explicit degeneracy conditions.

What Can Recall Its Past Lives

Edvan Aragão Santos — 2026-07-02

This article investigates the relationship between memory, time, and the photographic image through a philosophical dialogue among Henri Bergson, Roland Barthes, and the aesthetics of cinema. By revisiting Bergson’s notion of pure memory and Barthes’s concepts of studium, spectrum, and punctum, the essay explores how photography and film can give form to the ontological survival of the past. The analysis culminates in a reading of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives as a cinematic meditation on spectral temporality. Engaging with Derrida’s hauntology and the idea of the image as a trace of duration, the article proposes that photography and cinema are not merely representations of memory but modes through which the past coexists with the present in affective and sensorial ways. Ultimately, it asks: can an image recall its past lives?

Flipping the Counterfeit Coin

Nat Trimarchi — 2026-07-02

As Big-Tech gains more control over human appetites and aversions (which Hobbes notoriously reduced humanity to), it is crucial to understand technology’s limitations. Why it cannot do the most important thing, upon which the prudence to balance autonomy with necessity rests: distinguish believing from knowing. This is an ‘ethical’ deficiency, revealed in reasons proposed here why AI can’t possibly make art (replaced now mostly by cultural artefact-making, which AI will excel at). Because aesthetics is about knowing, not perceiving (as Kant believed), such reasoning matters to human survival. It has deteriorated in modern mythology under the mechanistic worldview that Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and others of the failed enlightenment project advanced to control Nature. Now driven by an avaricious political and technocratic elite advancing posthuman (anti-humanist) ideology, ‘mechanism’ underwrites excesses leading humanity toward self-destruction via militarism, dehumanisation, and ecological devastation. To control it, contrasting nature's teleological "mechanism" with humanity's ‘telos’, I propose embracing an "ahistorical" humanist perspective rooted in the Principle of Art, ancient mythology, and Aristotelian and Schellingian inspired complexity science. This shows mechanism and teleology are two different species of ‘acts’; and having a “free relation” with both Nature and technology requires promoting humanity’s ahistorical ‘being’ via genuine art-making.

Is Technological Civilization the Universal Culmination of Intellectual Evolution?

Olev Vinn — 2026-07-02

The assumption that technological civilization is final stage of evolution of intellect and the universal indicator of advanced ETI is not well justified. For a hypothetical unlimited intellect, technological civilization would be unnecessary if immortality, flawless and boundless memory, unlimited capacity for information processing, perfect communion between minds, and infinite sensory perception were already given. Intelligent entities sufficiently close to such an intellect may exist in the universe without developing technological civilizations, yet still be scientifically and culturally more advanced than any society that relies on them. Presumably, all successful technological civilizations eventually create entities approaching this hypothetical unlimited intellect, at which point the technological framework becomes redundant and is abandoned. Alternatively, unknown evolutionary pathways of matter may give rise directly to such entities, entirely bypassing the technological stage of development. It is therefore possible that the most advanced minds and the least advanced minds in the universe share a common trait: the absence of technological civilization.

Conatus as Viability: Spinoza’s Ethics and the Geometry of Persistence

Nobuchika Yamaki — 2026-07-02

This paper reconstructs Spinoza’s Ethics as a formal theory of viable dynamical systems. It argues that conatus, the striving of each thing to persevere in its being, can be expressed as a viability constraint: the condition that the expected rate of persistence, E[dP/dt], remains non-negative. Within this framework, power (potentia) corresponds to a system’s viability function P(x, t), affect to its temporal derivative dP/dt, adequate ideas to predictive models that enhance expected viability, and freedom to the invariance of viability-optimizing behavior under perturbation. Extending this principle to collective and computational systems reveals an ethical and cognitive symmetry: actions and understandings that increase viability are virtuous, while those that diminish it are destructive. The resulting ontology identifies being with organization rather than substance, yielding a form of structural realism consistent with modern systems theory and the free-energy principle. Spinoza’s Ethics thus anticipates a geometry of persistence—a unified account of existence, cognition, and value grounded in the dynamics of self-maintaining systems.

Determinative Potential Theory

Xiaozhou Zeng — 2026-07-02

This article develops Determinative Potential Theory (DPT), a structural metaphysical framework explaining how systems transition from symmetric coexistence of mutually exclusive possibilities to single-valued realized outcomes accompanied by irreversible traces. The theory addresses conceptual problems concerning determinacy, temporal order, and cosmological directionality. Three axioms—finite termination, intralayer single-value fixation, and non-zero rollback cost—yield propositions establishing a poset of determinative events, the emergence of temporal order from structural dependency, the impossibility of reversion, and the constraining role of early determinative events. The article compares DPT with modal metaphysics, quantum interpretations, structural realism, process philosophy, and entropy-based theories of time. DPT provides a unified metaphysical explanation of determinacy and cosmic structure, relevant to cosmology and natural philosophy.