Infinity — An Outline of Conceptions in Mythology, Cosmology and Natural Philosophy

Abstract

The earliest conceptions of infinity and eternity apparently occurred in Oriental cosmological and cosmogonical myths and fables that have been passed down in popular tradition and epic texts. Some of these became codified in literary religions as holy scripts and were subsequently refined in interpretations and commentaries. The pre-Socratic Greek natural philosophers were the first to detach themselves from myths and religious authority and began to ponder questions of cosmology and cosmogony independently of religious tradition and offered a variety of original views, many of which involved notions of infinity and eternity in various senses and contexts. The Medieval patriarchs, theologians and scholastic philosophers digested and filtered the Oriental religious and the Greek philosophical thought, transferred the idea of infinity from cosmology to theology and carried speculations about the immensity of God and His virtues to the extreme. In the Renaissance the legacy of the Greek natural philosophy and Indian arithmetics were mediated to Europe by the Arabs which allowed the natural philosophers of the Renaissance to bring the notion back to physical cosmology and the astronomers and mathematicians to pave the way for the rise of science and new manifestations and interpretations of the notion of infinity.