Norton, John D. "The Cosmological Woes of Newtonian Gravitation Theory," in H. Goenner, J. Renn, J. Ritter and T. Sauer, eds., The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity: Einstein Studies, volume 7, Boston: Birkhäuser, pp. 271-322.
Background: Isaac Newton, Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Dr. Bentley. London: Dodsley, 1756.
slides
Milne, E. A. "A Newtonian Expanding Universe," The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, Volume os-5, Issue 1, 1934, pp. 64–72.
Norton, John D. "The Force of Newtonian Cosmology: Acceleration is Relative" Philosophy of Science, 62, 1995, pp.511-22. https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/homepage/cv.html#L1999
Background:
Malament, David (1995) "Is Newtonian Cosmology Really Inconsistent?" Philosophy of Science 62, pp.489-510.
slides
Kant, Immanuel Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) in W. Hastie, ed. and trans., Kant's Cosmogony. Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1900. Preface, pp. 17-37 Survey, pp. 38-43 and any further parts that look tempting.
Page by page view of original German edition of 1755 https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/show/kant_naturgeschichte_1755
Einstein, Albert "§2. The Need for an Extension of the Postulate of Relativity" pp. 112-115 in "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity."
Einstein, Albert "Considerations on the Universe as a Whole" Part III in Relativity: The Special and the General Theory New York: Henry Holt, 1921.
Einstein, Albert: Brief recapitulation of the Machian inspiration in his 1946 Autobiographical Notes
Einstein, Albert pp. 108-119 in Meaning of Relativity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1923.
From Einstein for Everyone:
Einstein abandons lambda
De Sitter Spacetime, Space in de Sitter Spacetime
Penrose on de Sitter Spacetime
W. de Sitter, "On the relativity of inertia. Remarks concerning Einstein's latest hypothesis," in: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Proceedings, 19 II, 1917, Amsterdam, pp. 1217-1225.
slides
Norton, John D. ""Einstein against Singularities: Analysis versus Geometry," Philosophy of Physics 2(1): 13, 1–73.
slides
Background: My investigation of the tangle of relations of evidential support in Hubble's paper:
Ch. 7 "The Recession of the Nebulae" in John D. Norton, The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference. BSPSopen, 2024.
Lemaître, Georges "The beginning of the world from the point of view of quantum theory" Nature 127, p. 706 (1931);
and, for a general survey of Lemaitre's contribution to cosmology
Lemaître, Georges "The beginning of the world from the point of view of quantum theory" Editorial Note by Jean-Pierre Luminet, General Relativity and Gravitation (2011) 43, pp. 2911–2928.
For Eddington's "Philosophically the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me." See Eddington, Arthur S. "The End of the World (From the Standpoint of Mathematical Physics)" The Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 15, No. 212 (Mar., 1931), pp. 316-324.
"Kinematical Relativity" Ch. XI in Hermann Bondi Cosmology 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Press, 1968.
For a revealing, short statement by Milne of the difference between kinematical relativity and standard Friedmann-Lemaître cosmology, see Section 1 only of Milne, E. A. "A Newtonian Expanding Universe," The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, Volume os-5, Issue 1, 1934, pp. 64–72.
Notes
Background only:
Milne, E. A. Relativity, Gravitation and World-Structure Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935.
(Origin of centrality of "cosmological principle.")
Robertson, H. P. "Relativistic Cosmology," Reviews of Modern Physics, 5(1933), pp.62-89.
Dingle, Herbert "Science and Modern Cosmology," Presidential Address, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 113 (1953), pp. 393-407.
Whitrow, G. J. and Bondi, Hermann "Is Physical Cosmology a Science? A Discussion," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4 (1954), pp. 271-283
Penzias, A. A. and Wilson, R. W. "A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080Mc/s" Astrophysical Journal, vol. 142, pp. 419-421.
Dicke, R. H.; Peebles, P. J. E.; Roll, P. G.; Wilkinson, D. T., "Cosmic Back-Body Radiation," Astrophysical Journal, vol. 142, pp. 414-419.
"Origins of the cosmology of the 1960s" Chapter 3 in Peebles, P. J. E. et al. Finding the Big Bang Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Historical aspects
Introduction, Ch.10. and Ch. 12 in Perovic, Slobodan and Cirkovic, Milan, The Cosmic Microwave Background: Historical and Philosophical Lessons Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Optional, long, background survey: Partridge, R. Bruce, "The cosmic microwave background: from discovery to precision cosmology," in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Modern Cosmology Oxford, 2019.
Ch. 25, Ch. 26 and Ch. 27 in Perovic, Slobodan and Cirkovic, Milan, The Cosmic Microwave Background: Historical and Philosophical Lessons Cambridge University Press, 2024.
""Λ cold dark matter"
"Cosmic Dynamics with a non-Zero Cosmological Constant Λ" in Einstein for Everyone
Riess, Adam et al. "Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant," The Astronomical Journal 116:1009-1038, 1998
What is missing in the primer is anything on MOND, which repeatedly attracts the attention of philosophers of science. E.g. Duerr, Patrick M. and Wolf, William "Methodological reflections on the MOND/dark matter debate," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 101 (2023), pp.1–23
(Similar material, with more detail, in Andrew Liddle, "An Introduction to Cosmological Inflation," https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9901124v1)
Background: Alan Guth, "Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problem," Physical Review, 23 (1981), pp. 347-56.
Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt and Abraham Loeb, "Pop Goes the Universe," Scientific American February 2017, pp. 32-39
Alan H. Guth, "Eternal inflation and its implications," J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 40,(2007),pp. 6811–6826.
Consider the sections on eternal inflation. Similar content in both papers.
slides
Verde, Licia; Nils Schöneberg and Héctor Gil-Marín, "A Tale of Many H0" Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 62(2024), pp. 287–331.
Dark Energy Survey, "A new study reveals potential inconsistencies in the current standard cosmological paradigm" Press Release, March 19, 2025.
The paper with lots of technical details:
Dark Energy Survey, "Implications for cosmological expansion models from the final DES Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and Supernova data" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06712
(The pdf has an arXiv date stamp of 29Mar 2006, but the doc itself is internally dated November 26, 2024. None of the references are dated after 2006.)
EVERYONE: Pick a thesis from Ellis' "Issues in the Philosophy of Cosmology" and be prepared to discuss it.