The Philosophy of Astrobiology

[This is a draft syllabus for a course I'll be teaching. Suggestions for further readings and topics welcome.]

Summary. Are we alone in the universe? Part of the answer to this question depends on what or whom we are willing to count as “others”. Would microbes on Mars be sufficient? Or do we need to have confirmation of intelligent life, perhaps with technological capabilities beyond our own? While statistical reasoning and discoveries in exoplanetary astronomy have brought about tremendous revolutions in recent decades in the way we think about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, there remain some enduring ideas that return again and again, from antiquity to the present, and in different cultures around the world, in the way we represent alien life to ourselves. What can we learn from the study of these representations? And what are the limits of contemporary science in its effort to resolve the mystery of alien life? These will be the principal questions guiding our philosophical inquiry in this class.

Schedule of Classes and Readings (in many cases the reading will be an excerpt from the work indicated)

Week 1. Aliens, Angels, and Celestial Intelligences

Harry A. Wolfson, “The Plurality of Immovable Movers in Aristotle and Averroës,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63 (1958): 233-253.
Edward Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687 (1994).
Dominik Perler, “Thought Experiments: The Methodological Function of Angels in Late Medieval Epistemology,” in Isabel Iribarren and Martin Lenz (eds.), Angels in Medieval Philosophical Inquiry: Their Function and Significance, 2008, 143-154.

Week 2. Ancient Theories of the Habitability of the Moon

Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 3.11.
Plutarch, On the Face in the Moon.
Lucian, True History.

Week 3. Proto-Science-Fiction as Speculative Science

Johannes Kepler, Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy (1608).
Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, Histoire comique des États et Empires du Soleil (1662).

Supplementary reading: Frédérique Aït-Touati, Contes de la Lune. Essai sur la fiction et la science modernes, Paris: Gallimard, 2011.

Week 4. The Plurality of Worlds, Part 1

Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584).
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1660).
Henry More, Democritus Platonissans; or, an Essay upon the Infinity of Worlds out of Platonick Principles (1646).

Supplementary reading: Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957.

Week 5. The Plurality of Worlds, Part 2

G. W. Leibniz, Monadology (1714)
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686).

Week 6. The Cosmotheoros: The “First” Work of Scientific Astrobiology

Christiaan Huygens, Cosmotheoros (1698).

Week 7. The Eighteenth Century

Thomas Wright, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750).
Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755).
Emmanuel Swedenborg, Earths in the Universe (1758).

Supplementary reading: William Derham, Astro-Theology: Or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, From a Survey of the Heavens, London, 1714.

Week 8. Russian Cosmism

N. F. Fyodorov, The Philosophy of the Common Task (1908).
K. E.Tsiolkovsky, The Will of the Universe: The Unknown Intelligence (1928).
Justin E. H. Smith, “Why Cosmism? Why Now?” Tank Magazine 74 (Winter, 2018).

Week 9. Spontaneous Generation, Panspermia and the Origin of Life

Athanasius Kircher, Mundus subterraneus (1665).
A. I. Oparin, The Origin of Life (1938 [1924]).
J. B. S. Haldane, “The Origin of Life,” Rationalist Annual (1929).
B. Corliss, J. . Baross, S. Hoffman, ”An Hypothesis Concerning the Relationships Between Submarine Hot Springs and the Origin of Life on Earth,” Oceanologica Acta No. SP (1981): 59-69.
David Warmflash, “Did Life on Earth Come from Another World?” Scientific American 293, 5 (November 2005): 64-71.

Supplementary reading: Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Week 10. The Cold War and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, Frank Drake, “A Message from Earth,” Science 175/4024 (25 Feburary 1972): 881-884.
Justin E. H. Smith, “'It's All Dark': The Cold War Race to the Dark Side of the Moon,” Cabinet Magazine 50 (2013): 21-26.

Week 11. The Anthropic Principle and The Fermi Paradox: Making Sense of the Silence

John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986).
Duncan H. Forgan, Solving Fermi's Paradox (2019).

Week 12. The Drake Equation: Calculating Probabilities

Bonnie J. Buratti, “Earths Above: The Search for Exoplanets and Life in the Universe,” in Douglas A. Vakoch and Matthew F. Dowd (eds.), The Drake Equation: Estimating the Prevalence of Extraterrestrial Life through the Ages (2015).
Athena Coustenis and Thérèse Encrenaz, Life Beyond Earth (2013).

Week 13. New Discoveries

S. Sullivan and John A. Baross, Planets and Life: The Emerging Science of Astrobiology, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Harold Morowitz and Carl Sagan, “Life in the Clouds of Venus?” Nature 215 (1967): 1259-1260.
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee and Daniel Clery, “A Gallery of Planet Hunters,” Science 340, 6132 (3 May 2013): 566-569.

Week 14. Do We Even Know What We're Looking For (or, What Is Life?)

Susan Schneider, “It May Not Feel Like Anything to Be an Alien,” Nautilus 080 (January 16, 2020).

Comments

Stephen Webb's "If the Universe is teeming with aliens, WHERE IS EVERYBODY?" is a very readable and comprehensive examination of "75 solutions to the Fermi Paradox."

I don't have it to hand, but I think there's some good material by Fred Hoyle on panspermia, some of it allied with his "viruses in space" theories.

I wish this class had been offered when I was in college!

Posted by: Thomas Frick | November 30, 2020 at 05:59 PM

On the science side of things, and in reference to the last question in your first paragraph, you and your students might find the Astrobiology Primer (v2.0, in the journal Astrobiology, vol 16, pp562-653) a useful reference. I did not contribute to the primer. I am a chemist who just finished teaching a Chemical Origins of Life course aimed at junior/senior undergraduates this semester, which focused on chemistry (and not on philosophy).

Posted by: Jeremy Kua | December 2, 2020 at 04:30 PM