Abstract

In the fifth and early sixth decades of the last century several significant works were published on the philosophical background and epistemological limits of physical cosmology such as Bondi?s epistemological discussion in the first chapters of his Cosmology , Dingle?s paper in Vistas in Astronomy or Harre?s analysis in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. In the light of the intensive development of relativistic cosmology following the discovery of the cosmic background radiation in 1964, such works may seem outdated, and the problems raised by them have actually been forgotten or suppressed by the community of philosophers and physicists alike over the last decades.