Kosmos (κόσμος) — “Order,” “ornament,” “arrangement,” “universe.” The Greek term denotes an ordered, beautiful whole; it is the root of the word “cosmetic,” that which adorns. The Greeks called the world kosmos because they conceived it not as a chaotic heap of things but as a whole governed by an intelligible order, opposed to primordial khaos. For the pre-Socratic thinkers, this cosmos possesses an arché — an originating, governing principle (water in Thales, the apeiron in Anaximander, fire and logos in Heraclitus) — that accounts for its regularity. Heraclitus speaks of a single cosmos common to all, ruled by a measure. Plato, in the dialogue Timaeus, describes the cosmos as a living being ordered by a divine craftsman (the demiurge) after eternal models, whereas Aristotle conceives it as a finite, hierarchically arranged universe of spheres. For the Stoics, the kosmos is a rational, living organism wholly permeated by the divine logos (the pneuma), so that cosmic order and moral order coincide: to live well is to live “in agreement with the nature” of the whole. The notion is thus bound up with that of logos — the reason that structures the real — and stands opposed to khaos. Later cosmology, down to the present, inherits from this Greek vocabulary the very project of explaining the order of totality.
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