Philosophical and Technological Reflections on Contemporary Cosmology

Cosmology has undoubtedly become an epistemically successful science. Some of its successes include explaining the Cosmic Microwave Background and its features (temperature, anisotropies, polarization, etc.) with high precision; accounting for the abundances of the light chemical elements in the universe with high accuracy; discovering the isotropic accelerated expansion of the universe; establishing a model that synthesizes the results of various observational research projects (SNIFS, BOSS, COBE, etc.) into a relativistic model of an overall flat geometry with predictive power, and much more.

On the one hand, its success makes cosmology a reliable ground on which to test philosophical theses and frameworks motivated by research in other areas of science (Doboszewski & Elder, 2026; Elder, 2025). On the other hand, despite its success, there remain several philosophical concerns regarding the standard model of cosmology and inflation (Jacquart, 2021; Smeenk, 2014), the conceptual character and metaphysics of the phenomena it aims to account for (Martens & Lehmkuhl, 2020; Josset, Pérez & Sudarsky, 2017), the integration of relativistic and quantum theories into a coherent whole (Sudarsky, Urrutia & Vucetich, 2002; Okón & Sudarsky, 2014), the epistemological significance of computational methods (Gueguen, 2020; Meskhidze, 2023), and the challenges involved in developing a science of the universe itself (Ellis, 2001; Smeenk, 2017). 

Our aim is to provide space for these discussions.