Cosmogony

Cosmogony is any model concerned with the coming-into-existence or origin of the cosmos.

Relevant Quotes:
DK 11A12 ''"Most of the original seekers after knowledge recognized only first principles of the material kind as the first principles of all things. For that out of which all existing things are formed––from which they originally come into existence and into which they are finally destroyed––whose substance persists while changing its qualities, this, they say, is the element and first principle of all things... However, they disagree about how many of such first principles there are, and about what they are like. Thales, who was the founder of this kind of philosophy, says that water is the first principle (which is why he declared that the earth was on water); he perhaps reached this conclusion from seeing that everything’s food is moist, and that moisture is the source and prerequisite for the life of warmth itself (and the source of anything is the first principle of that thing). ''

"So, as I say, it was perhaps this that led him to reach this conclusion, and also the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature (and water is the first principle of the moist nature of moist things). And there are people who think that those in the dim, distant past who first began to reason about the gods, long before our present generation, shared this conception of the underlying nature; for these poets made Ocean and Tethys the parents of creation, and claimed that the gods took their oath upon water––the river Styx, as the poets call it." Aristotle, Metaphysics

Text References:

 * Waterfield, Robin. 2000. The first philosophers: the presocratics and sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Related terms:

 * Cosmography
 * Cosmology