World

Image of the physical world, captured by the Hubble space telescope.

In its most general sense, the word "world" it refers to the totality of entities, to the set of reality or to everything that was, is and will be. The nature of the world has been conceptualized in different ways in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as something unique, while others speak of a "plurality of worlds." Some treat the world as a simple object while others analyze the world as a complex made up of many parts. In scientific cosmology, the world or universe is commonly defined as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been and will be'. Modality theories, on the other hand, speak of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways of how things could have been. Starting from the horizon of co-present objects on the periphery of each experience, phenomenology defines the world as the greatest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". In the philosophy of mind, the world is commonly contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. Theology conceptualizes the world in relation to God, for example, as God's creation, as identical with God, or in relation to the interdependence between the two. In religions, there is often a tendency to depreciate the material or sensory world in favor of a spiritual world that is sought through religious practice. A comprehensive representation of the world and our place in it, as commonly found in religions, is known as a worldview. Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world, while eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or the end of the world.

In various contexts, the term "world" it takes on a narrower meaning associated, for example, with the Earth and all life on it, with humanity as a whole, or with an international or intercontinental scope. In this sense, world history refers to the history of humanity as a whole or world politics is the discipline of political science that studies issues that transcend nations and continents. Other examples include terms like "world religion", "world language", "world government", "world war", "population world", "world economy" or "world championship".

Conceptions

Different fields often work with quite different conceptions of the essential features associated with the term "world.". Some conceptions consider the world to be unique: there can be no more than one world. Others speak of a "plurality of worlds". Some view worlds as complex things made up of many substances as their parts, while others hold that worlds are simple in the sense that there is only one substance: the world as a whole. Some characterize worlds in terms of objective spacetime, while others define them in relation to the horizon present in each experience. These different characterizations are not always exclusive: it may be possible to combine some without leading to a contradiction. Most of them agree that the worlds are unified wholes.

Monism and pluralism

Monism is a thesis about unity: that only one thing exists in a certain sense. The denial of monism is pluralism, the thesis that, in a sense, there is more than one thing. There are many forms of monism and pluralism, but in relation to the world as a whole, two are of special interest: monism /existence pluralism and priority monism/pluralism. Existence monism asserts that the world is the only concrete object that exists. This means that all "objects" Concrete objects that we encounter in our daily lives, including apples, cars, and ourselves, are not really objects in the strict sense. Instead, they are just dependent aspects of the world object. This world object is simple in the sense that it has no genuine parts. For this reason, it has also been called a "blobject", since it lacks an internal structure like a blob. Priority monism allows other concrete objects as well as the world. But he holds that these objects do not have the most fundamental form of existence, that they depend in some way on the existence of the world. Corresponding forms of pluralism, on the other hand, assert that the world is complex. in the sense that it is made up of concrete and independent objects.

Scientific Cosmology

Scientific cosmology can be defined as the science of the universe as a whole. In it, the terms "universe" and "cosmos" they are commonly used synonymously with the term "world". A common definition of the world/universe found in this field is as "the totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be'. Some definitions emphasize that there are two other aspects of the universe besides space-time: forms of energy or matter, such as stars and particles, and laws of nature The different conceptions of the world in this field differ both in their notion of spacetime and in the content of spacetime. The theory of relativity plays a central role in modern cosmology and its conception of space and time. An important difference from his predecessors is that he conceives of space and time not as separate dimensions, but as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime. This can be seen in special relativity in relation to the Minkowski metric, which includes both space and time components in its definition of distance. General relativity goes a step further by integrating the concept of mass into the concept of spacetime as its curvature. Quantum cosmology, on the other hand, uses a classical notion of space-time and conceives of the entire world as a large wave function that expresses the probability of finding particles in a given location.

Theories of modality

The concept of the world plays an important role in many modern theories of modality, usually in the form of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete and consistent way of how things could have been. The real world is a possible world, since the way things are is a way things might have been. But there are many other ways things could have been than how they really are. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US election, but she could have. That is why there is a possible world in which she won. There are a large number of possible worlds, one corresponding to each of those differences, no matter how small or large, as long as no contradictions are introduced in this way.

Possible worlds are often conceived as abstract objects, for example, in terms of unobtained states of affairs or as sets of maximally consistent propositions. From this point of view, they can even be considered as belonging to the real world. Another way of conceiving of possible worlds, made famous by David Lewis, is as concrete entities. According to this conception, there is no important difference between the real world and possible worlds: both are conceived of as concrete, inclusive, and spatiotemporally connected. The only difference is that the real world is the world we live in, while other possible worlds are not inhabited by us, but by our counterparts. Everything inside a world is spatiotemporally connected to everything else, but the different worlds do not share a common spacetime: they are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. This is what makes them separate worlds.

It has been suggested that, in addition to possible worlds, there are also impossible worlds. Possible worlds are ways of how things could have been, so impossible worlds are ways of how things could not have been. Such worlds imply a contradiction, such as a world in which Hillary Clinton won and lost the 2016 US election. Both possible and impossible worlds have in common the idea that they are totalities of their constituents.

Phenomenology

Within phenomenology, worlds are defined in terms of horizons of experiences. When we perceive an object, such as a house, we not only experience this object in the center of our attention, but also also various other surrounding objects, present at the periphery. The term "horizon" refers to these co-present objects, which are normally experienced only in a vague and indeterminate way. The perception of a house involves several horizons, corresponding to the neighborhood, the city, the country, the Earth etc In this context, the world is the largest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". It is common among phenomenologists to understand the world not only as a spatiotemporal collection of objects, but also incorporate various other relationships between these objects. These relationships include, for example, indication relationships that help us anticipate an object by finding the appearances of another object, and means-end relationships or functional involvements relevant to practical concerns.

Philosophy of Mind

In the philosophy of mind, the term "world" often used in contrast to the term "mind" as that which is represented by the mind. This is sometimes expressed by stating that there is a gap between the mind and the world and that this gap must be bridged for representation to be successful. One of the central problems of the philosophy of mind is to explain how the mind is capable of to bridge this gap and enter into genuine mind-world relationships, for example, in the form of perception, knowledge, or action. This is necessary so that the world can rationally restrain the activity of the mind. According to the realist position, the world is something other than and independent of the mind. Idealists, on the other hand, conceive of the world as partially or wholly determined by the mind. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, for example, postulates that the spatiotemporal structure of the world it is imposed by the mind on reality, but otherwise lacks independent existence. A more radical idealist view of the world can be found in Berkeley's subjective idealism, which holds that the world as a whole, including all everyday objects like tables, cats, trees, and ourselves, "consists of nothing but minds and ideas".

Theology

Different theological positions hold different worldviews based on their relationship to God. Classical theism affirms that God is completely different from the world. But the world depends for its existence on God, both because God created the world and because He maintains or preserves it. This is sometimes understood by analogy with the way humans create and maintain ideas in their imagination, with the difference being that the divine mind is much more powerful. According to such a view, God has an absolute and ultimate reality, in contrast to the lower ontological status attributed to the world. God's participation in the world is usually understood as a of a personal and benevolent God who cares for and guides His creation. Deists agree with theists that God created the world, but deny any further personal involvement in it. Pantheists, on the other hand, reject the separation between God and world. Instead, they claim that the two are identical. This means that there is nothing in the world that does not belong to God and that there is nothing in God beyond what is found in the world. Panentheism is an intermediate position between theism and pantheism. Against theism, he maintains that God and the world are interrelated and dependent on each other. Against pantheism, he argues that there is no absolute identity between the two. Atheists, on the other hand, deny the existence of God and therefore worldviews based on their relationship. With God.

History of Philosophy

Parménides

Parmenides argues that the everyday perception of the reality of the physical world as described in the doxa, that is, in the common opinion, is wrong, and the reality of the world is to be as described in alétheia: an unalterable, unengenderable and indestructible whole.

Plato

Plato is well known for his theory of forms, which postulates the existence of two different worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world is the world we live in, filled with changing physical things that we can see, touch, and interact with. The intelligible world, on the other hand, is the world of invisible, eternal, and immutable forms such as good, beauty, unity, and equality. Plato attributes a lower ontological status to the sensible world, which only imitates the world of the forms. This is due to the fact that physical things exist only to the extent that they participate in the forms that characterize them, while the forms themselves have an independent mode of existence. In this sense, the sensible world is a mere replica of the perfect exemplars found in the world of forms: it never lives up to the original. In the allegory of the cave, Plato compares the physical things we know with mere shadows of real things. But not knowing the difference, the prisoners in the cave mistake the shadows for the real thing.

Hegel

In Hegel's philosophy of history, the expression Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht (World History is a tribunal that judges the World) is used to assert the view that History will judge the world. men, their actions and their opinions. Science was born from the desire to transform the world in relation to man; its ultimate goal is technical application.

Schopenhauer

The world as will and representation is the central work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer saw the human will as the Kantian noumenon or thing-in-itself. He believed, then, that we could obtain knowledge about the thing-in-itself, something that Kant said was impossible, since the rest of the relationship between the representation and the thing-in-itself could be understood by analogy to the relationship between the human will and the thing-in-itself. and the human body.

Wittgenstein

"The world is everything that happens" or, in other translations, "it is the case," wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1922. This definition would serve as the basis of empiricism. logical, that is the assumption that there is exactly one world, consistent in the totality of facts, regardless of the interpretation that each individual makes of them.

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and yet we move in a common world". The world, for Heidegger, was the one in which that we were always "thrown" and with which we, as beings in the world, must come to terms. His conception of "worldwide disclosure"; it was elaborated most notably in his 1927 work Being and Time.

Eugen Fink

"World" is one of the key terms in the philosophy of Eugen Fink. He thinks there is a wrong tendency in Western philosophy to understand the world as one enormously big thing containing all the little everyday things we are familiar with. He considers this Vision is a form of forgetting the world and he tries to oppose it through what he calls the "cosmological difference": the difference between the world and the interior things it contains. In his opinion, the world is the totality of things within the world that transcends them. It is in itself unfounded, but it provides a foundation for things. Therefore, it cannot be identified with a mere container. Instead, the world gives appearance to things within the world, providing them with a place, a beginning, and an end. One difficulty in investigating the world is that we never find it, since it is not just one more thing that appears to us. us. That is why Fink uses the notion of play to elucidate the nature of the world. He sees the game as a symbol of the world that is both part of it and represents it. Play is often accompanied by a form of world of imaginary play that involves various things relevant to the game. But just as the game is more than the imaginary realities that appear in it, the world is more than the real things that appear in it.

Freud

In response, Sigmund Freud proposed that we do not move in a common world, but in a common thought process. He believed that all of a person's actions were motivated by one thing: the libido. This force conditions our entire vision of the world or of reality, which is the result of the pulse between unconscious instinctive tendencies and superconscious repressive tendencies.

Nelson Goodman

The concept of the world plays a central role in the late philosophy of Nelson Goodman. He argues that we need to posit different worlds to explain the fact that there are different incompatible truths to be found in reality. Two truths are incompatible if they ascribe incompatible properties to the same thing. This happens, for example, when we affirm both that the earth moves and that the earth is at rest. These incompatible truths correspond to two different ways of describing the world: heliocentrism and geocentrism. Goodman calls such descriptions 'versions of the world'. He holds a correspondence theory of truth: a version of the world is true if it corresponds to a world. Incompatible true world versions correspond to different worlds. It is common for modality theories to postulate the existence of a plurality of possible worlds. But Goodman's theory is different, since it postulates a plurality not of possible worlds but of real worlds. Such a position runs the risk of implying a contradiction: there cannot be a plurality of real worlds if the worlds are defined as maximally sets. inclusive. This danger can be avoided by interpreting Goodman's world concept not as maximally inclusive sets in the absolute sense, but relative to their corresponding world version: a world contains all and only the entities that its world version describes.

David Lewis

Some philosophers, often inspired by David Lewis, argue that metaphysical concepts such as possibility, probability, and necessity are best analyzed by comparing the world to a range of possible worlds; a view commonly known as modal realism. For him there is an infinite number of causally isolated worlds and ours is just one of them.

Markus Gabriel

For the philosopher Markus Gabriel, the world does not exist because he considers it a super-object. The existence of an object, by definition, is about its appearance with its own characteristics that distinguish it from other objects in a given context. This is not the case with the concept of superobject or world, since this would have all the characteristics of all the objects it contains, making it indistinguishable and, therefore, non-existent. Gabriel, by proclaiming that there is no superobject or World, ends up adopting a philosophical position pluralist.

José Ortega y Gasset

For the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, the world is inseparable from the self: "I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself". And all consciences are interconnected through a system of perspectives whose integration constitutes the world, reality itself.

Francisco Miró Quesada

For Francisco Miró Quesada there are three axes to classify the different philosophical conceptions of the world: the materialist-spiritualist axis, the finalist-contingentialist axis and the essentialist-existentialist axis. For example, Marx saw the world in a "materialist" way. finalist” (dialectical materialism) while religions see the world from a “finalist spiritualist” perspective (eschatology and the end of the world) either in its essentialist (Saint Thomas) or existentialist (Gabriel Marcel) aspect. Mechanism sees the world in a "contingentialist materialist" way, that is, in the universe there is no specific reason or purpose for which the laws of nature are one way, as they could have been another.

Religion

Christianity

For the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the world is one of the three "enemies of the soul": world, devil and flesh. This negative conceptualization of the world contrasts with the positive Greco-Latin concept of mundus 'everything ordered, organized, clean'. For the Judeo-Christian theological conception, the world represents the "material" or the sphere of "profane life", as opposed to the celestial, spiritual, transcendental or sacred. Thus, cloistered monks and nuns who shut themselves up in monasteries renounce the "world& #3. 4;. The "end of the world" refers to the settings of the culmination of human history, often in religious contexts. However, Catholic Theology has also clearly formulated the perception that Revelation, through Holy Scripture or the Bible, has of the world, through God's creative act: it is good (Genesis), not only because of the constant affirmation of its Creator but by the consequences derived from its nature. Man, then, was initially placed in a world that was good (Paradise), but according to the same story, that world was affected by man's action very early in history, when he transgressed a principle of his nature. By pretending to be like God, he upset that essential order and turned the world into an enemy. Subsequent doctrine fundamentally picked up this moral consequence and abandoned the metaphysical perspective about the goodness of the world.

Islamic

In Islam, the term "dunya" is used for the world. Its meaning is derived from the root word "dana", a term for "nearby". >this world in contrast to the spiritual world. Some religious teachings warn of our tendency to seek happiness in this world and advise a more ascetic and concerned with the afterlife. But other strands of Islam recommend a balanced approach.

Hinduism

Hinduism constitutes a broad family of religious-philosophical views. These views present different perspectives on the nature and role of the world. The Samkhya philosophy, for example, is a metaphysical dualism that understands reality as composed of two parts: purusha and prakriti. The term "purusha" it represents the conscious individual self that each of us possesses. Prakriti, on the other hand, is the single world inhabited by all these individuals. The Samkhya understands this world as a world of matter governed by the law of cause and effect. The term "matter" it is understood in a very broad sense in this tradition, including both physical and mental aspects. This is reflected in the doctrine of tattvas, according to which prakriti is composed of 23 different principles or elements of reality. These principles they include both physical elements, such as water or earth, and mental aspects, such as intelligence or sense impressions. The relationship between purusha and prakriti is generally conceived as one of mere observation: purusha is the conscious self of the world of prakriti, but does not causally interact with it.

A very different conception of the world is present in Advaita Vedanta, the monistic school among the Vedantic schools. Unlike the realist position advocated in the Samkhya philosophy, Advaita Vedanta sees the world of multiplicity as an illusion, known as maya. This illusion also includes our impression of existing as separate experiencing beings, called jivas. In contrast, Advaita Vedanta teaches that at the most fundamental level of reality, known as brahman, there is no plurality or difference. All there is is one all-encompassing self: atman. Ignorance is considered the source of this illusion, which results in enslavement to the world of mere appearances. But liberation is possible in the course of overcoming this delusion by acquiring knowledge of Brahman, according to Advaita Vedanta.

Etymology and usage

The term "world" derives from the Latin word mundus, which literally means 'clean, elegant'; itself is a loan translation of the Greek cosmos, 'perfection' or 'ordered set'. The Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order in chaos.

'World' refers to the entire planet or the population of any particular country or region: world affairs refers not just to one place but to the entire world and world history is a field of history that examines events from a global perspective (rather than a national or regional one). Earth, on the other hand, refers to the planet as a physical entity and distinguishes it from other planets and physical objects.

'World' It can also be attributed to the meaning of 'global', 'relative to the whole world', forming usages such as World Community.

By extension, a 'world' can refer to any planet or astronomical object, especially when believed to be inhabited, in the context of science fiction or futurology.

'World', in the original sense, when qualified, can also refer to the particular domain of human experience.

• The world of work describes paid work and the search for a career, in all its social aspects, to distinguish it from the home area and the academic study.
• The world of fashion describes the environment of designers, fashion houses and consumers who make the fashion industry.

Expressions

In the past, those countries with capitalist economies such as the United States and the countries allied to it after the Second World War were considered first world. The second world included communist countries, such as the former USSR or China, and all the countries allied to them or under their influence, while the third world included those countries that had a neutral position.

Currently, developed countries are considered First World countries, that is, they have great industrial capacity, great technological advances and have easy access to a large amount of raw materials. Second World countries are countries that also have great industrial capacity and technological advancement, but have less access to raw materials than First World countries. Third World countries are considered to be countries that have a large quantity of raw materials, but do not have great industrial capacity or great technological advance and that are linked to the world market through the export of raw materials. The term "Fourth World" to refer to the poor regions of the planet belonging to the capitalist sector and to the less developed countries of this, such as the homeless who live in the richest cities of the capitalist countries, whose level of poverty exceeds that of the inhabitants of the third world.

The concept of the world in other disciplines

The world has been represented in very different ways according to civilizations and cultures; Many of these representations have been changing or not as said civilizations and cultures have changed or not. In the Western sphere (and more specifically according to the Christian conception derived from the Almagest of the pagan cosmographer Claudius Ptolemy), the world was divided into two parts: the natural or nature, imperfect and mutable and situated below of the lunar orbit, and the super-natural, perfect and immutable and situated above the orbit of the Moon. The Renaissance of the 16th century began to doubt and criticize this geocentric and Christian vision and replaced it with a heliocentric and mechanistic one.

The world history is commonly understood as an understanding of the major geopolitical developments of five millennia, from the invention of writing by early civilizations to the present. On the other hand, with the expression New World versus Old World we refer respectively on the one hand to America, a part of the world colonized at the dawn of the age of discovery, and on the other to the colonizing part, with a better known history. These denominations were extended to the field of zoological and botanical classifications, as for example in the case of the New World monkey.

In politics, the terms first, second and third world divide countries into large groups. The first world designates the capitalist, rich or economically developed countries; the second to the communists and the third world groups the rest of the countries, the majority poor, developing or underdeveloped. The expression fourth world is even used to refer to countries where poverty is extreme.

The world population is the sum of all human inhabitants of any age; Similarly, the world economy is the sum of the economies of all societies (all countries), especially in the context of globalization. Terms like world championship, world gross product, flags of the world, etc., also imply the sum or combination of all sovereign states.

In terms like world religion, world language, and world war, the word world suggests an international or intercontinental scale without necessarily implying the participation of the entire world.

Mapmundi.

In terms like world map and world climate, the word world is used in a sense detached from human culture or civilization, referring physically to planet Earth.

Related terms and issues

Worldviews

A worldview is an overall representation of the world and our place in it. As a representation, it is a subjective perspective of the world and therefore different from the world it represents. higher animals need to represent their environment in some way in order to navigate through it. But it has been argued that only human beings possess a sufficiently comprehensive representation to merit the term 'worldview'. Philosophers of worldviews often hold that the understanding of any object depends on a worldview that constitutes the background against which this understanding can take place. This can affect not only our intellectual understanding of the object in question, but also the experience of it in general. It is therefore impossible to assess one's own worldview from a neutral perspective, since this assessment already presupposes the worldview as its own. background. Some hold that each worldview is based on a single hypothesis that promises to solve all the problems of our existence that we may encounter. According to this interpretation, the term is closely associated with the worldviews given by different religions. Worldviews offer guidance not only in theoretical matters but also in practical matters. For this reason, they usually include answers to the meaning of life question and other evaluative components about what matters and how we should act. An individual's worldview may be unique, but worldviews are generally shared by many. people within a certain culture or religion.

Many Worlds Paradox

The idea that many different worlds exist is found in various fields. For example, modality theories speak of a plurality of possible worlds and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics bears this reference even in its name. Talking about different worlds is also common in everyday language, for example with reference to the world of music, the world of business, the world of football, the world of experience or the Asian world. But, at the same time, worlds are often defined as wholes that include everything. This seems to contradict the very idea of a plurality of worlds, for if a world is whole and includes everything, then it cannot have anything outside of it. he. Understood in this way, a world cannot have worlds other than itself or be part of something larger. One way to resolve this paradox while maintaining the notion of a plurality of worlds is to constrain the sense in which worlds are wholes. From this point of view, worlds are not wholes in an absolute sense. This could even be understood to mean that, strictly speaking, there are no worlds at all. Another approach understands worlds in a schematic sense: as dependent expressions. context that represent the current domain of discourse. Thus, in the expression "Around the world in eighty days", the term "world" refers to the earth, while in the expression "the New World" refers to the landmass of North and South America.

Cosmogony

Cosmogony is the field that studies the origin or creation of the world. This includes both scientific cosmogony and creation myths found in various religions. The dominant theory in scientific cosmogony is the Big Bang theory, according to which space, time, and matter originate from a singularity. that occurred about 13.8 billion years ago. This singularity was followed by an expansion that allowed the universe to cool enough for the formation of subatomic particles and later atoms. These initial elements formed giant clouds, which later coalesced into stars and galaxies. Non-scientific creation myths are found in many cultures and are often enacted in rituals that express their symbolic meaning. They can be classified in relation to their content. Types often found include creation out of nothing, chaos, or a cosmic egg.

Eschatology

Eschatology refers to the science or doctrine of the last things or the end of the world. It is traditionally associated with religion, specifically the Abrahamic religions. In this form, it can include teachings both on the end of individual human life and on the end of the world as a whole. But it has also been applied to other fields, for example, in the form of physical eschatology, which includes scientifically based speculation about the far future of the universe. According to some models, there will be a Big Crunch in which the entire universe collapses back into a singularity, possibly resulting in a second Big Bang later. But current astronomical evidence seems to suggest that our universe will continue to expand indefinitely.

World History

World history studies the world from a historical perspective. Unlike other approaches to history, it employs a global point of view. It deals less with individual nations and civilizations, which it tends to approach with a high level of abstraction. Instead, it focuses on broader regions and zones of interaction, often interested in how people, goods, and ideas move from one region to another. It includes comparisons of different societies and civilizations, as well as considering wide-ranging developments with long-term global impact, such as the process of industrialization. Contemporary world history is dominated by three main paradigms of research that determine periodization at different times. One is based on the productive relationships between humans and nature. The two most important changes in history in this regard were the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry in relation to food production, which began around 10,000 to 8,000 B.C. span>, which is sometimes called the Neolithic Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which began around AD 1760. and involved the transition from manual to industrial manufacturing. Another paradigm, which focuses on culture and religion instead, is based on Karl Jaspers' theories on the Axial Age, a time in which various new forms of religious and philosophical thought appeared in various separate parts of the world around the time between 800 and 200 B.C. A third periodization is based in relations between civilizations and societies. According to this paradigm, history can be divided into three periods in relation to the dominant region in the world: the dominance of the Middle East before 500 B.C., the cultural balance Eurasian to AD 1500. C. and Western rule from 1500 AD. C. Big History employs an even broader framework than world history by putting human history in the context of the history of the universe as a whole. It begins with the Big Bang and covers the formation of galaxies, the solar system, the Earth, its geological eras, the evolution of life and human beings up to the present.

World politics

World politics, also known as global politics or international relations, is the discipline of political science that studies issues of interest to the world that transcend nations and continents. Its goal is to explain the complex structures found in the social world and which are often related to the search for power, order and justice, generally in the context of globalisation. It focuses not only on relations between nation states, but also considers other transnational actors, such as multinational corporations, terrorist groups, or non-governmental organizations. For example, it tries to explain events such as the September 11 attacks. of 2001, the Iraq war of 2003 or the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

Various theories have been proposed to address the complexity involved in formulating such explanations. These theories are sometimes divided into realism, liberalism, and constructivism. realists consider nation states to be the main actors in world politics. They constitute an anarchic international system with no higher power to control their behavior. They are considered sovereign agents who, determined by human nature, act in their own national interest. Military force can play an important role in the ensuing power struggle between states, but diplomacy and cooperation are also key mechanisms through which nations achieve their goals. The liberalists recognize the importance of states, but also emphasize the role of transnational actors, such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They see human beings as perfectible and highlight the role of democracy in this process. The emerging order in world politics, according to this perspective, is more complex than a mere balance of power, since more different agents and interests are involved in its production. Constructivism attributes more importance to the agency of individual human beings than realism and liberalism. Understands the social world as a construction of the people who live in it. This leads to an emphasis on the possibility of change. If the international system is an anarchy of nation states, as realists hold, then this is only so because we have made it so, and it may well change, as this is not prefigured by human nature, according to constructivists.