This article elaborates a claim, first introduced by Wilhelm Dilthey, that metaphysics represents an illusory flight from the tragedy of human finitude. Metaphysics, of which psychoanalytic metapsychologies are a form, transforms the unbearable fragility and transience of all things human into an enduring, permanent, changeless reality, an illusory world of eternal truths. Three "clinical cases...

While there is no consensus about the history of time since the beginning, in this paper I will discuss some possibilities. We have a pretty clear picture of cosmic history from the electroweak phase transition through the time of recombination, a period which includes the QCD phase transition and big bang nucleosynthesis. This paper includes a quantitative discussion of the age of the universe...

In a previous paper, two of the authors presented a " regulated " picture of eternal inflation. This picture both suggested and drew support from a conjectured discontinuity in the amplitude for tunneling from positive to negative vacuum energy, as the positive vacuum energy was sent to zero; analytic and numerical arguments supporting this conjecture were given. Here we show that this conjectu...

Every de Sitter vacuum can transition to every other de Sitter vacuum despite any obstacle, despite intervening anti-de Sitter sinks, despite not being connected by an instanton. Eternal inflation populates the whole landscape.

We show that the Willmore ow for smoothly immersed initial surfaces has eternal solutions in a weak sense, which are smooth except at nitely many times. Furthermore we study the set of singularities of such a weak solution.