Science fiction can sometimes seem to be just good, frivolous entertainment. In fact, the origins of science fiction can be traced back to early modern philosophy, when philosophers used storytelling that imagined alternative worlds and beings in order to make better sense of the scientific revolution and the religious and political upheaval that accompanied it. Even today, science fiction stories are often elaborate thought experiments – a useful philosophical device - bringing ideas to life and having an impact on our imagination and thought that dry, analytic essay writing isn’t capable of, writes Lisa Walters.   

While science fiction fans watching Dune or Star Wars may not consider such activities as philosophical, the genre of science fiction can trace its origins to the discipline of philosophy.

Some of the earliest science fiction authors (who wrote sci fi before such a label existed) were well-known philosophers. The Renaissance saw the rise of what we now refer to as science fiction; philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, and Margaret Cavendish wrote fictional stories about their philosophical and scientific ideas.

Today’s distinctions between science and philosophy made less sense 350-400 years ago. Many scientists called themselves natural philosophers, a branch of philosophy broadly

interested in investigating the workings of nature and the universe. In addition, the Renaissance was not only the era of the Scientific Revolution, but also it was a time when Europeans discovered that the world was much larger and more unfamiliar than was ever thought possible as they began to travel around the globe and colonize the Americas. Renaissance philosophers such as Kepler imagined a new culture and aliens that inhabited the moon. [1] Bacon also imagined a sophisticated scientific society somewhere west of Peru, and Cavendish portrayed an alien world (or parallel reality) filled with intelligent creatures with their own unique solar system. For those philosophers, what we would call science fiction today was once a way of doing philosophy.

Imagining new cultures and worlds can serve as what is known as a “thought experiment” in philosophy, a strategy which transfers the reader to another world, society or time for the purpose of exploring and enacting unconditionally a philosophical idea. For example, René Descartes, who held that we cannot be certain of the existence of the external world outside of our minds, used a thought experiment where he imagined an evil genius deceiving him into believing the existence of external reality. While Descartes did not turn this thought experiment into speculative fiction, it was essentially done for him 350 years later, updated for the age of computers, in the film, The Matrix (1999).