I provide an explication of the content and method of Husserl’s phenomenology, explicating the ideas of bracketing and reduction and of descriptive, eidetic and transcendental phenomenology. In the process I set out his ideas of act intentionality, of co-intending and horizons and of active and passive constitution. I then give an account of how Merleau-Ponty adopts and adapts Husserl’s ideas and methodology, recasting phenomenology as an existential and genetic but nonetheless transcendental enterprise. I go on to outline his account of the scientistic and physicalistic picture of the world presented by what he calls objective thought, his major target from the outset. Against this backdrop, I show that he opposes objective thought because it either reduces consciousness to a physical body in a determined world (as empiricism) or takes it as something that acts from above on a physical and agency-neutral body in a similarly determined world (as intellectualism).

Which of the four-parameter family of Friedman–Robertson–Walker (FRW) cosmological models best fits our universe and why? This chapter addresses these two central questions for observation and theory in cosmology. Of the four parameters that define an FRW model, only two are determined by observations so far: the Hubble constant; and the ratio of energy density in radiation to the critical density. To determine the others, the spacetime geometry of the universe must be measured on large scales through a study of how matter moves through it. We describe two illustrative ways of doing that – one based on observations of distant supernovae, and the other on observations of the cosmic background radiation. Remarkably, the best cosmological parameter values are consistent with the universe being spatially flat – right on the borderline between positive and negative spatial curvature.

In this chapter, we concentrate on a particular endpoint of stellar evolution – the state of ongoing gravitational collapse leading to a black hole. This possibility must exist in nature because there is a maximum amount of nonrotating matter that can be supported against gravitational collapse by Fermi pressure or nuclear forces. This mass is in the neighbourhood of two solar masses. (The exact value is uncertain because our knowledge of the properties of matter above nuclear densities is uncertain.) There are many stars more massive than this upper limit, so it is likely that some must wind up in a state of ongoing collapse. This chapter also explores the properties of this state.

This chapter introduces the critical issues that permeate the discussion of the location and horizon of Coetzee’s literary practice. It starts by noting a polarization among critics between those who characterize his literary project as being a highly localized one that speaks to the condition of South Africa and those who regard his work as being concerned with universal problems and as belonging to ‘world literature’. It delves into this problem by considering the way Coetzee himself narrates the vicissitudes of a writer navigating national and global literary fields in Elizabeth Costello. Looking next at his corpus as a whole, the chapter argues that an appreciation of Coetzee’s peculiar world-making fictional strategies helps us to discern that world (or worlds) to which his fictions seek to orient us. It concludes by considering Coetzee’s recent interest in the ‘literatures of the south’, speculating that his corpus has been concerned to explore through its world-making what it means to live beneath southern horizons.