English

Noun

cosmoi

1. plural of cosmos
   • 1850: James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow [ed., prop.], De Bow’s Review of the Southern and Western States, volume 9, page 153

     This doctrine supposes all the material universe to have been once in a fluid or nebular condition, and that, by the operation of universal gravitation and the thousand other laws of nature, the nebular matter has been mainly aggregated into masses, and the existing cosmoi been developed.

   • 1949: Felix M. Cleve, The Philosophy of Anaxagoras, part 4: “Infinity in Space and Time”, chapter X, chapter title, page 125 (2007 republication)

     One Cosmos or Many Cosmoi?

   • 2010: Robert C. Koons and George Bealer [eds.], The Waning of Materialism, part IV: “Alternatives to Materialism”, essay 15: Terry Horgan, “Materialism, Minimal Emergentism, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness”, pages 309–310

     In seeking a satisfactory formulation of materialism, it helps to employ the notion of a possible world. Possible worlds are plausibly construed not literally as universes other than the single real universe (i.e., not as cosmoi), but rather as total ways the cosmos might be — i.e., maximal properties instantiable by the single real world (the single cosmos). On this usage, the item designated as the actual world — considered as one among the various possible worlds — is not itself the cosmos either, but rather is the total cosmos-instantiable property that is actually instantiated by the cosmos. But it will be convenient in practice to speak as though the actual world is the cosmos and as though other possible worlds are other such cosmoi — a harmless enough manner of speaking, as long as one bears in mind that it is not intended literally.