Watchers of the Sky: Christiaan Huygens on Humans and Extraterrestrials
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | In this paper, the idea of extraterrestrial life in early modern science is discussed, especially its presence in the treatise Cosmotheoros (1698) by Christiaan Huygens. Huygens’s work deals with extraterrestrial beings - their appearance, their knowledge, their technology and their civilization. I would like to put that Huygens’s work into the context of other authors from the 17th century, who speculated about the possibility of extraterrestrial life (e. g. F. Godwin, C. de Bergerac), and show its peculiarities. The main part of my contribution, however, will focus on the philosophical ideals that appear in Cosmotheoros, especially his ideas on the development of science and culture. By emphasizing the relationship between science and development of civilization Huygens left the intellectual world of early modern science, which did not particularly conceptualize relationship between science and the philosophy of history, and entered the new age of Enlightenment, for which, by contrast, this relationship was a very important topic. |
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