Studies in History

and Philosophy
of Science
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 567569
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Introduction
Laura J. Snyder a, Thomas P. Weber b

a
Department of Philosophy, St. Johns University, New York, USA
b
Via Marsala 17, I-21014 Laveno Mombello (VA), Italy

Abstract

The question of the existence of intelligent life on other worlds has never been a purely scientic one. Philosophical, religious and
literary issues have been intertwined with scientic ones throughout the history of the plurality of worlds debate. This collection of
papers in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science explores the interrelation of science, philosophy, religion and literature in
debates about extraterrestrial life.
2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Throughout history, the human imagination has
invented and populated worlds before they were in fact dis-
covered. Humans were conjectured to exist in prehistoric
times and on unexplored continents even prior to evidence
for their reality.1 Since the nineteenth century, these play-
ing elds of the literary and scientic imagination have
for the most part been replaced by the vast scope of the
universe; now, the realm of other possible worlds exists
in outer space. But what has remained constant is that
the question of extraterrestrial life has never been a purely
scientic concern: there simply is no clear line separating
science from philosophy, literature or theology. The issue
of extraterrestrial life is thus an ideal eld for historians
and philosophers of science to explore the interplay of
modern science, religion, philosophy, and literature. And
such an exploration is the motivating force behind this col-
lection of papers for Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science.
Until the late nineteenth century, when Darwinism was
becoming the dominant framework in which to judge the
place of man on Earth and in the cosmos, theological
and philosophical concerns were inseparably tied together
with astronomy in discussions of other worlds. On the
one side, it was often argued that God designed all the
planets as commodious Habitations for Creatures
endowed with Capacities of knowing, obeying and adoring
their benecent Creator,2 and thus that there was a plural-
ity of seats of intelligent life. Others worried about the dif-
culties in reconciling such a view with the belief that God
had singled out humans for special attention. With a few
notable exceptions, most natural philosophers and theolo-
gians tried to bring together the plurality and theological
views. The demise of natural theology changed the funda-
mental premises of the debate, but the diversity of its con-
tributors remained. Questions concerning the origin of life,
the role of contingency and necessity in evolution as well as

E-mail addresses: snyderl@stjohns.edu (L.J. Snyder), Thomas.Weber@jrc.it (T.P. Weber).

1
Landau (1991); Campbell (1999); Stoczkowski (2002).
2
Ferguson (1754), p. 29.

0039-3681/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2007.06.010
568 L. J. Snyder, T. P. Weber/ Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 567569
the very nature of life and how it is to be recognized came
to the forefront. Such concerns bring science to its episte-
mological, methodological and conceptual limits, where
borders between disciplines become most permeable. In
this sense the situation remains much as the same as in
the mid-nineteenth century, when William Whewell
claimed that the discussions [of extraterrestrial life] belong
to the very boundary region;to the frontier where knowl-
edge, at least astronomical knowledge, ends.3
One twentieth-century manifestation of this permeabil-
ity is the ourishing of the science ction genre, in which
science, literature and philosophy come together in the con-
sideration of alien life. Important innovators of the genre,
such as H. G. Wells, were inuenced by developments in
the science of their day.4 Further, the genre has made
philosophical questions regarding the nature of life and
its knowability a constant topic of discussion. The Kraken
wakes (1953) by John Wyndham and Solaris (1961) by
Stanislawem (himself a scientist) are two novels that fun-
damentally question the ability of humans to understand
the intentions of alien beings or even recognize the phe-
nomenon of life in all its possible forms at all. In so-called
hard science ction5, it has become a popular challenge to
portray truly alien, but allegedly scientically plausible
forms of life. In Dragons egg (1980) by the physicist Rob-
ert L. Forward, intelligent life is discovered on the surface
of a neutron star, where the gravity is 67 billion Earth grav-
ities. Stephen Baxter uses a similar scenario in Flux (1993)
and Greg Egan, one of the most talented and radical hard
SF writers, imagines exotic quantum life forms in Schilds
ladder (2001).
This kind of philosophical thinking about possible life
forms has not remained limited to literary endeavours,
but has also permeated scientic discussions. Scientists
were forced to confront the question what is life? in
designing experiments for seeking life on Mars during the
Voyager project in 1976. More recently, in 2003, two
Romanian physicists pressed against the boundaries of
accepted denitions of life when they observed the emer-
gence of growing and dividing bubbles in a low tempera-
ture plasma of the gas argon.6 The scientists argued that
the bubbles displayed features similar to a primitive organ-
ism, and speculated further that such bubbles or spheres
could be the foundation of other forms of life. In Evolving
the alien (2002) the biologist Jack Cohen and the mathema-
tician Ian Stewart argue that other forms of life probably
require conditions nothing like that found on Earth, and
that recent scientic discoveries vastly expand the possibil-
3
Whewell (2001 [1853]), p. 115.
4
See Dick (1998, pp. 115116).
5
Writers in this subgenre (christened in 1957) pride themselves of only employing plausible and rigorous (but on the whole still adventurous) short or
long-term projections of current scientic theories in their narratives. A classical examples of a near-future projection in hard SF is the space elevator
suggested by Arthur C. Clarke and the SF-writer and physicist Charles Sheeld, while far-future projections are mostly concerned with technologies of
interstellar travel and the galactic destiny of mankind.
6
Lozneanu & Sanduloviciu (2003).
7
Basalla (2006).
8
For more on this development, see Dick (1998), pp. 245254.
ities for life elsewhere in the universe. Cohen and Stewart
have spun out their theories of alien life in two novels
(Wheelers, 2000, and Heaven, 2004), demonstrating nicely
that the permeability of boundaries between science and
ction works both ways.
Despite the demise of natural theology, the issue of
extraterrestrial life has continued to bring religious consid-
erations into contact with scientic ones. When confronted
with the prospect of a universe teeming with countless civ-
ilisations, for example, many scientists are drawn towards
tropes of transcendence and revert to an openly religious
idiom.7 For others, the notion of a Godless universe in
which life develops by purely evolutionary processes gives
rise to the conviction that life probably exists elsewhere
in the universe, driven by the same processes. Indeed, the
twentieth century has seen the rise of a new astrotheology,
which considers what modications, if any, religion might
need if extraterrestrial intelligent life is found.8
The authors of the papers included here consider the
various ways in which the boundaries between disciplines
have been found to be permeable when the issue of extra-
terrestrial life is addressed. In her paper, Patricia Fara
shows that in the eighteenth century scientic texts and
works of ction marked two ends of a continuous spec-
trum. She illustrates the uid boundaries between fact
and ction in this time by discussing Mary Shelleys Fran-
kenstein and Ludvig Holbergs Niels Klims journey to the
underground in the light of Edmond Halleys earlier work
on terrestrial magnetism, particularly his claim that at the
center of the earth there is a solid globe surrounded by
three concentric shells, and that the spaces between these
shells could contain subterranean life. Laura Snyders
paper examines William Whewell, who has been called
the most learned, radical, and inuential anti-pluralist in
the nineteenth century, charting his move from a mildly
pro-plurality of worlds position in the early 1830s to a
staunchly negative position by 1853. Snyder shows how
philosophical, theological, and scientic considerations
were intertwined in his evolving considerations of the topic.
Specically, she points to three main reasons for Whewells
switch to an anti-plurality view: the inuence of Richard
Owens theory of vertebrate archetypes on Whewells view
of the argument from design, and Whewells perception of
the need to strengthen such arguments in light of evolution-
ary accounts of human origins; important developments in
his epistemology and philosophy of science, as well as his
public role as a scientic expert; and new ndings in
astronomy. Thomas P. Weber focuses our attention on
 L. J. Snyder, T. P. Weber/ Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 567569
the nineteenth-century thinker Carl du Prel, whose compre-
hensive mystic philosophy originated in a theory of extra-
terrestrial life. Weber uses this examination of du Prel to
illustrate the broader point that nineteenth-century spirit-
ism was a blend of religious elements, the philosophy of
mind, science and popular science. He argues further that
the spiritist tradition aects current discourse on extrater-
restrial life mainly through the so-called Golden Age sci-
ence ction literature of the 1940s and 50s and its
successors.
References
Basalla, G. (2006). Civilized life in the universe: Scientists on intelligent
extraterrestrials. New York: Oxford University Press.
Campbell, M. B. (1999). Wonder and science: Imagining worlds in early
modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
569
Dick, S. J. (1998). Life on other worlds: The 20th-century extraterrestrial
life debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, J. (1754). An idea of the material universe, deduced from a survey
of the solar system. London: printed for the author.
Landau, M. (1991). Narratives of human evolution. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Lozneanu, E., & Sanduloviciu, M. (2003). Minimal-cell system created in
laboratory by self-organization. Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 18,
335343.
Stoczkowski, W. (2002). Explaining human origins: Myth, imagination and
conjecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whewell, W. (2001). Of the plurality of worlds: A facsimile of the rst
edition of 1853; plus previously unpublished material excised by the
author just before the book went to press; and Whewells dialogue
rebutting his critics, reprinted from the second edition (M. Ruse, Ed.).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (First published as Of the
plurality of worlds: An essay. London: John W. Parker, 1853)