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ASTROBIOLOGY
The History and Philosophy of
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.
Course Schedule
Tuesday, November 3
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Readings:
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Harry A. Wolfson, “The Plurality of Immovable Movers in Aristotle and Averroës,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63 (1958): 233-253.
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Edward Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687 (1994).
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Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia II.12
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Tuesday, November 10
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Readings:
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Fragments of Anaxagoras
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Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus
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Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (II.1023–1175)
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Tuesday, November 17
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Readings:
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Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 3.11.
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Plutarch, On the Face in the Moon.
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Lucian, True History.
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Plotinus, Enneads II.1 (On the cosmos)
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Tuesday, November 24
Readings:
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Hasdai Crescas, Light of the Lord (c. 1410); IV.2 and I.3.4.
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Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584) (excerpt).
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Henry More, Democritus Platonissans; or, an Essay upon the Infinity of Worlds out of Platonick Principles (1646).
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Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686).
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Tuesday, December 1
Readings:
Christiaan Huygens, Cosmotheoros (1698).
Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755)
Emmanuel Swedenborg, Earths in the Universe (1758).
Athanasius Kircher, Mundus subterraneus (1665).
Tuesday, December 8
Readings:
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A. I. Oparin, The Origin of Life (1938 [1924]).
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J. B. S. Haldane, “The Origin of Life,” Rationalist Annual (1929).
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J. 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.
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David Warmflash, “Did Life on Earth Come from Another World?” Scientific American 293, 5 (November 2005): 64-71.
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Blaise Agüera y Arcas, What Is Life? Evolution as Computation, The MIT Press, 2025.
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Tuesday, December 15
Readings:
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John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986).
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Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk (2020); ch. 2: “Astrobiology”
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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).
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Harold Morowitz and Carl Sagan, “Life in the Clouds of Venus?” Nature 215 (1967): 1259-1260.
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Yudhijit Bhattacharjee and Daniel Clery, “A Gallery of Planet Hunters,” Science 340, 6132 (3 May 2013): 566-569.
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Susan Schneider, “It May Not Feel Like Anything to Be an Alien,” Nautilus 080 (January 16, 2020).
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