Excerpt:
The term "cosmology" has several different connotations, ranging from a society's world-view to the scientific study of the universe at large. I shall deal only with the latter meaning of the term, but even then it is far from obvious what cosmology is, exactly. We may provisionally define it as the attempt to understand the universe in scientific terms, which in practice means those of the mathematical-physical sciences. The keyword is the domain of cosmology, the universe, and it is this domain which makes cosmology as most peculiar science, for the reason that the universe is a most peculiar entity.