The Cosmos as a World City: A Hylomorphic Foundation for Civic Renewal

Abstract

This paper contends that the West’s civic crisis is, at root, a cosmological crisis: civic renewal requires metaphysical repair. It is insufficient to endorse virtue ethics and demand civic virtues without a deeper account of reality that can sustain them. What is needed is a cosmology—one informed by contemporary science—in which nature, personhood, and political community are meaningfully situated within an ordered whole. Drawing on the Platonic isomorphism between soul, city, and cosmos, I outline a hylomorphic framework with the potential to integrate key elements of neo-Aristotelian, Stoic, and Thomist metaphysics with developments in contemporary physics. Against the dominant atomistic and holistic paradigms, I argue that hylomorphism offers a more adequate account of personhood, the polis, and the cosmos itself as an intelligible whole.