Gravitation And Cosmology From The Hubble Radius to The Planck Scale Proceedings of a Symposium in Honour of The 80th Birthday of Jeanpierre Vigier

‘A work of singular importance . . . balanced, original, human, accessible, and riveting’ – Philippe Sands, author of East-West Street.

This collected volume is inspired by the work of Edward Halper and is historically focused with contributions from leading scholars in Ancient and Medieval philosophy. Though its chapters cover a diverse range of topics in epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy, the collection is unified by the contributors’ consideration of these topics in terms of the fundamental questions of metaphysics. The first section of the volume, “Knowing and Being,” is dedicated to the connection between metaphysics and epistemology and includes chapters on Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, and the Ancient Daoists. The second section, “Goodness as Knowing How to Be,” addresses ethics as an outgrowth of human metaphysical concerns and includes chapters on Plato, Aristotle, and Maimonides.

Although gravity is the dominant force of nature at large distances (from intermediate scales to the Hubble length), it is the weakest of forces in particle physics, though it is believed to become important again at very short scales. The conditions created in particle accelerators are similar to those at the time of the early universe.