Plurality Of Worlds Research Articles

Divided Selves in Exile: Third Space in Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings

Set in the early 20th century, Louis de Bernieres’ novel Birds Without Wings focuses on the divided identities negatively influenced by wars, exile, and migration in southwestern Anatolia just before the decline of the Ottoman Empire and foundation of Republican Turkey. Based on the decision of population exchange, a great number of non-Muslim people were deported to a foreign land (Greece), away from the newly defined borders of the new Turkish Republic. In his novel Birds Without Wings, Louis de Bernières scrutinizes this social phenomenon and questions the significance and validity of the notions such as race, religion, ethnicity or language in the nation building process. The author deplores the loss of multicultural lifestyle in a utopian, idyllic Anatolian town with the displacement of Greek and Armenian residents. The multicultural structure of society penetrates into the formal and narrative features of the novel, such as multiplicities in viewpoints, a mixture of genres, different languages and the use of nicknames for protagonists. Intercultural encounter provokes hybridity and leads to the emergence of multiplicities in society. However, the exchange of population puts an end to the long-established multicultural society structure, a dynamic cultural exchange and negotiation. The use of multiple voices, multiple characters, narrative techniques, and multiple languages in fact celebrates the hybridity and plurality of worlds throughout the novel. Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the in-between third space challenges the formation of cultural identity in hybrid societies, simultaneously embracing multiplicities, pluralities, and hybridity. The writer signals to the existence of such a harmonious heterogenous society in Anatolia in the past time and laments for the loss of such an idyllic lifestyle reigned by mutual love, respect, tolerance and cooperation. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate how Bhabha’s conceptualisation of “third space” finds a place in the lives of divided selves in Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings and to demonstrate how it deconstructs the binary thought and essentialist identity in intercultural encounters.

Exoheliotrope: Metaphor in the Texts of Astrobiology and Deconstruction

This article undertakes a deconstructive reading of astrobiology’s search for extraterrestrial life. Taking its lead from Derrida’s ‘White Mythology’, it explores ‘metaphor in the text of astrobiology’—and includes within the astrobiological ‘text’ not only scientific publications and work on astrobiology in the philosophy of science, but also ‘life detection technologies’. I situate astrobiology in the tradition of a metaphysical analogy that goes back through the enlightenment and early modern astronomy to the ancient Atomists’ notion of the ‘plurality of worlds’. This analogy, which constitutes an identification of life with being and therefore serves as the conceptual basis for the notion that life must exist on other worlds, experiences a mutation in the middle of the twentieth century when molecular biology refigures life in terms of a scriptural metaphor as text. The result is an aporia whose logic Derrida formalised in ‘White Mythology’.

F/acts Ways of Enactive Worldmaking

Knowing is an activity through which agents and world produce themselves. This is often expressed by the enactive claim that agents bring forth a world. I analyse this idea for different modes of agent–environment engagement: interactional, transactional, and constitutional. Something is produced in each case. Bringing forth a world is not only an epistemic but an ontological claim. Acts in their fine structure result from a process of fact production, or f/acts. F/acts co-emerge with their 'preconditions', e.g.intentions, affordances, across the subject/object divide. F/acts define their inner temporality and affectivity, comprising both event and experience. A plurality of worlds is admitted in this enactive view, without entailing antirealism. We cannot bring forth just any world. World resistance organizes action and experience. I touch on the implications for objectivity and free will and discuss the primordiality of activity, community, and relationality. From a notion of groundlessness in early enactive work, I suggest that a participatory universe is better conceived as a meshwork of groundless grounds.

A BROADER PERSPECTIVE ON “HUMANS”: ANALYSIS OF INSĀN IN TWELVER SHĪʿĪ PHILOSOPHY AND IMPLICATIONS FOR ASTROTHEOLOGY

AbstractThis article explores the essence of the human (insān) as it is understood in Twelver Shīʿī philosophy and mysticism. It presents a Shīʿī philosophical elucidation regarding the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligent lifeforms and what their relationship with “humanhood” might be. This line of reasoning is presented with a general sketch of how, in Shīʿī Islamic thought, a “human being” is characterized by specific traits and the relationship of human beings with the archetype of the Perfect Human (al‐Insān al‐Kāmil). Following this is a review of Shīʿī Imāmī traditions regarding extraterrestrial intelligent life and the plurality of worlds. This sequence ultimately allows for a unique analysis of humanhood according to the Shīʿī philosophical viewpoint and helps determine if the term “human” can be used for other intelligent beings with similar ontological features and intelligence levels.

The challenging history of other Earths

AbstractThis paper provides an overview of recent historical research regarding scientifically-informed challenges to the idea that the stars are other suns orbited by other inhabited earths – an idea that came to be known as ‘the Plurality of Worlds’. Johannes Kepler in the 17th century, Jacques Cassini in the 18th and William Whewell in the 19th each argued against ‘pluralism’ based on what in their respective times was solid science. Nevertheless, pluralism remained popular despite these and other scientific challenges. This history will be of interest to the astronomical community so that it is better positioned to avoid difficulties should the historical trajectory of pluralism continue, especially as it persists in the popular imagination.

Wild Design: Gambiarra, Complexity and Responsibility

Abstract: This paper proposes different approaches to design, referring to gambiarra practices and artifacts and their relation to complexity theory, evoking critical theorists that take undecidability into account in order to link gambiarra to operations that breed complexity and responsibility. The word gambiarra comes from Brazilian slang and describes an intervention or artifact meant to provide a provisory solution to an unexpected event or crisis. This kind of alternative design differs radically from conventional design because it does not come from formally trained, engineer-minded, projects. Instead, it lacks control, stability and durability. As it offers no permanent solution, it opens room for further accidents and is messy, especially if compared to a conservative model for creation that praises human predominance, soundness and efficiency. Therefore, gambiarra often has negative connotations that this analysis aims to challenge, by relating it to principles of complexity theory. Complexity theory is a transdisciplinary field for research aimed at the organization of living systems, with a vast understanding of networks and what life and govern are. It gathers insights from different disciplines to explore the interconnectivity between individuals, their systems and environment. It unveils how ambivalent information/noise relationships are fundamental for the increase of diversity in a system. It also displays the intelligent dynamics resulting from seemingly insignificant neighborhood relations that collectively make it possible to adapt and continuously change structures. With that in mind, the “deficient” aspect of gambiarra becomes more valuable, as it hints at a potential to generate new information and structures beyond entropic models that perpetuate the same logics across time. Michel Serres’s information theory presented in the book The Parasite is brought up in comparison to gambiarra, in order to explore the potential of interdependent ambiguous relationships that may not fit in dominant forms of discourse. Concomitantly, Vilém Flusser’s notion of responsibility reinforces the argument that a fabric of dynamic differences can emerge out of mutual engagement and indeterminacy. Underlying, this paper concerns with drafting ecological discourses and practices that can embrace contradictions and the plurality of worlds, noticing complex phenomena that have been pushed to the margins, while also decentralizing from hegemonic models. It questions the predominance of the prevailing design paradigm in the search for non-eurocentric and non-anthropocentric human-environment relationships and forms of provision of human needs.

Vilcabamba: de iura fluminis et Terrae

Vilcabamba: de iura flumnis et Terrae. A Chamber Music Piece in Two Acts and Intermezzo is an artistic project aimed at bringing the voices of rivers to the 23rd Biennale of Sydney. The work is inspired by a critical cartography approach, or what Nato Thompson and Trevor Paglen define as “experimental geography” to offer the opportunity to “rethink” the world, the plurality of worlds, and epistemologies that concur to reshape relations between humans and ecosystems. In this context, indigenous peoples recur to GIS (Geographic Information System, currently used, among others, to identify potential sacrifice zones for resource extraction) to challenge the dominant colonial-settler use and vision of land and territories and mainstream their cosmology, traditional knowledge, and livelihoods. Similarly, GPS (Geographic Positioning System) coordinates can be “hacked” to bring to light struggles for the recognition of the Rights of Nature and legal personhood of ecosystems, while advancing an imagery that aims to liberate political imagination and the voice of those ecosystems. Hacking geospatial technologies can offer the possibility for the non-human to be represented or to emerge, and hence challenge the dominant epistemology, creating a sort of “placement-displacement” circle, whereas the definition of a place brings with it a “displacement” of its canonical representation.

A Short History of Panspermia from Antiquity Through the Mid-1970s.

Panspermia is the philosophical proposition that the precursors of life are present in space and able to initiate life on reaching a suitable environment (especially the Earth). Only in the past century has the subject advanced from the lowly status of a dreamy hypothesis to a vibrant new science that is testable and observable. This history of panspermia presents the major figures associated with such hypotheses. It examines their motives, methods, and arguments, situated when possible in their historical context and culture rather than their impact on the present. From antiquity to the early modern period (1500-1800), the debates on the plurality of worlds and panspermia overlapped considerably. In the later modern period (1800 to the present), the narrative thread interweaves panspermia with the origin of life and the theory of evolution, and we can see authentic inputs from scientists rather than philosophers. In the interests of concision, I have omitted topics such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the exploration of the solar system by probes and landers, planetary protection (the inverse of panspermia), and the discovery of exoplanets. The historical literature is sometimes confusing: to correct for that, I have personally examined the original sources of every work cited rather than simply accepting the published findings of other scholars at face value.

Presentism’s persisting problem

ABSTRACT David Lewis [1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers] famously declares that presentism is unable to allow for objects to persist and therefore should be rejected. The underlying idea is that presentism, in which only present entities exist, conflicts with persistence, which requires an object exist at multiple times. Both presentists and eternalists alike take this objection to be easily dismissed because the presentist can offer a tensed account of persistence in which an object persists iff it exists and it will or did exist. Although it is the standard presentist response to Lewis, this strategy is inherently problematic. I show that if persistence is formulated in a tensed way, the presentist cannot distinguish a temporal series of unrelated instantaneous objects from a persisting object. Because there is no persistence in a temporal series of unrelated instantaneous objects, if the presentist cannot establish a difference between the two kinds of objects, the presentist’s account does not qualify as an adequate account of persistence.

Alfred Russel Wallace about harmony in the Universe (To the 120th anniversary of his work "Man's Place in the Universe")

The idea of the unity of man and the Universe was developed in many philosophical and religious teachings. However, the first who scientifically substantiates it was Alfred Russel Wallace (1823—1913) — a British naturalist, traveler, geographer, biologist, and anthropologist of the XIX century. He noted that the idea of the «plurality of worlds» of Copernicus, where the Earth is one of the many planets inhabited by intelligent beings, is not supported by observations. Wallace substantiated that the possibility of the emergence of life and mind in the universe depends on many interrelated conditions. He concluded that «any planet in the solar system other than our Earth is uninhabited» and «almost as likely that no other Sun has inhabited planets». Wallace held the view that humans were the only intelligent beings and could have originated exclusively on Earth as the pinnacle of the evolution of the Universe. The researcher admitted the possibility of the existence of other worlds with other physical laws but believed that only in ours it was possible for a man to appear, and that is why our Universe arose.

Идея мультиверса: междисциплинарная перспектива

The article discusses modern trends in the development of the idea of the multiverse (plurality of worlds) on the material of natural science. In physics, this is a multi-world interpretation of H. Everett’s quantum mechanics, in biology, the teachings about Umwelt by J. von Uexkul, in cognitive science, the notion of cognitive isolation, subjectively personal coloring, phenomenological certainty of the worlds of cognition and creativity of individuals. It is shown what some conceptual foundations can be offered for finding ways to develop an integrative vision, for building bridges from physics to biology and from biology to social sciences and humanities. Evolutionary epistemology, the conception of autopoiesis, theory of complex systems, and biosemiotics are considered as possible bearing conceptual nodes for interdisciplinary synthesis. These theoretical conceptions make it possible to tentatively explain why there are many worlds and why they are separated from each other, cognitively closed in the living nature. Leibniz’s ideas about possible worlds, a wealth of potentialities, subtle connections and eventual interweaving of worlds and their compossibility and self-reference turn out to be very relevant today. Various realizations of the world that arise as a result of measuring particles states in quantum mechanics, the worlds (umwelts) of living organisms, semantic worlds in human creative activity are just options in which nature expresses itself, reads itself, calculates itself, correlates with itself, and there are countless options.

Totality of Means of Interaction with the Reader in the Footnotes of A.D. Cantemir to the Russian Translation of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds

The article deals with functional totality of means of interaction with the reader in the footnotes by A.D. Cantemir to his Russian translation of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. The content, the language and the genre of the footnotes prove them to be addressed to the Russian reader. On the linguistic level, it is expressed by actualization of modus categories and metatextual means that do not only point at the addresser indirectly, but also highlight the reader’s figure in the footnotes’ text. Actualization of modus categories allows Cantemir to bring him closer to the reader in the same textual space and time, whereas metatextual units control the reader’s attention by structuring information. Interaction of these linguistic means within the text of footnotes provides interaction between Cantemir and the Russian reader: their common space and time increase the persuasive effect of explanations and examples introduced by metatextual means.

Christiaan Huygens’s Natural Theology in HisCosmotheorosand Other Late Writings

Christiaan Huygens’s late writings, ranging from 1686 to 1695, bear witness to his philosophical and theological reflections. In his Cosmotheoros, which was intended for publication, and other late writings that can be regarded as its preparatory drafts, Huygens deals with issues central to seventeenth-century philosophical debates: God’s power, divine and human intelligence, probabilistic epistemology, natural theology, and the plurality of worlds. This paper explains how Huygens’s reflections on animals and their souls, rational or not, play a key role in his epistemological reflections on natural theology. The issue of animal generation, as well as of animal souls, is crucial to identifying elements of continuity between the scientific topics of Huygens’s works, and may be considered as the point of intersection between his understanding of mechanism and of the teleology of nature. This neglected perspective on Huygens’s philosophical-natural animism reveals key elements of his model of rationality and of his attitude towards religion, demonstrating his involvement in the debate over animism, in which he seems to have been strongly influenced by English Protestant empiricism.

Dünyalaştıran Çoğaltma ile Uluslararası İlişkileri Yeniden İmal Etmek

The contemporary IR craft homogenizes a pluriverse of time-spacescapes as if it were a “one-world world.” We
 propose a strategy of recrafting to engender a nimble discipline for actively encountering ‘the world multiply’ and
 a generation of scholars capable of engaging various forms of knowing/being/sensing/doing. Worlding multiply
 requires: (1) taking seriously the plurality of worlds that emerge through distinct existential assumptions and
 (2) learning how to translate/read across time-spacescapes built through incommensurate ways of doing/being
 without reducing one to the other. We suggest conscientiously developing tools—new skills, concepts, ways of
 being—for encountering complexity in both pedagogy and scholarship.

Postmodern açıdan Salman Rushdie’nin Utanç adlı romanı

Postmodern fiction, which appeared in a post-World War II period, bears distinctive qualities from other literary movements such as realism and modernism structurally, stylistically and thematically. It can be perceived as a challenge against or attack on fixed language systems, subject matters, narrative style, plot development in the face of modernist and realist quest for meaning in a fragmentary world. One of the principal works of postmodern literature published in 1983, Shame by Salman Rushdie exhibits the best features of a post-modern novel by a style of magic realism by touching some political issues and some significant characters in a turbulent Pakistan in the way of historiographic fiction. Although language seems to reflect real historical events, an imaginative and subjective narrative style betrays its break with reality. Shame deserves being called as ‘a postmodern novel’ in the light of the key characteristics of postmodern fiction such as narrative fragmentation and reflexivity, the decentring of the subject, fictional framing of devices and the plurality of worlds, the displacement of the real by simulacra, magic realism and historiographic metafiction. Therefore, in the novel Shame where the loss of reality and meaning is celebrated rather than lamented, I will try to demonstrate how it is worth the title of “a postmodern novel” by resorting to its comparisons and contrasts with such movements as realism and modernism.

Between Worlds in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors

ABSTRACT This article turns to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1594) in order to revise critical accounts of globalization and to propose a contrasting notion of “world” as a function of affective experience, collective narration, and virtual witnessing. Shakespeare’s play captures how a newly global imaginary was beginning to disrupt many of the foundations of personal identity and the familiar reference points of the worlds that sustained it. The Comedy of Errors acknowledges the integrative effects of a globalizing system while also emphasizing its multiply-centered, regional specificity; Shakespeare models not a single, totalizing globality but a plurality of worlds characterized by continuous rupture, reconfiguration, and an ongoing state of in-betweenness. Not only does the play illuminate a non-Eurocentric view of globalization but it explores the alienation that attends migration and displacement at a global scale and the ways these movements mark the body for violence and refigure the human relationships that bond people together. In doing so, the play reveals an experience of exclusion that is constitutive of race insofar as its somatic determinations follow a logic that is both incomprehensible and absolute. The play also demonstrates how dramatic processes of collective story-telling and mutual witnessing can re-world both subject and community alike, showing us how “globalization” is an historically-contingent iteration of “worlding” that is neither static, inevitable, nor permanent.

Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives by Ranjan Ghosh

MLR, .,   Judy A. Hayden and Daniel J. Worden put Emperor into the context of contemporary mockery at the seriousness of men of letters (rather than the Royal Society itself), interpreting the play as an attack on the belief in a plurality of worlds. Behn references Lucian’s Icaromenippus, Godwin’s e Man in the Moone, de Villars ’s Count of Gabalis, and Wilkins’s e Discovery of a World in the Moon, and knew Fontenelle’s Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes, which she translated in the following year. ere she may criticize Fontenelle’s failure ‘to recognise scripture and church authorities on the issue’ (p. ), but the editors do not mention her questioning of biblical authority in matters of science in the preface to her translation, nor the common strategy of avoiding charges of blasphemy by paying lip-service to religious orthodoxy. Importantly, they highlight the play’s gender aspect, drawing attention to Behn’s belief in women’s intellectual equality with men, and to Emperor’s commonsensical female and foolish male characters. However , Balliardo’s fantastic theories also illustrate the fact that art, science, alchemy, and magical thinking did not yet occupy separate realms in Restoration thinking, as Elaine Hobby and James Hogarth point out in their forthcoming edition of Emperor (e Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn,  vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), vol. ). Whether ‘Behn’s political voice resounds loudly’ (p. ) in this farce is a matter of contention among scholars. Hayden and Worden interpret Balliardo’s patriarchal ‘autocracy’ as a ‘trope’ for the ‘tyranny’ of the royal ‘patriarch’, James II, whose promotion of Catholics and attempts at religious toleration ‘miscalculated his people’s wishes’ and threatened to rush him ‘headlong towards self-destruction’ (p. ). Behn, however, was generally not a follower of Filmer’s ideology which likened the monarch’s power over his subjects to that of a father over his family. Two appendices give brief biographical information about Behn and Fatouville. As the volume is addressed to both students and scholars (p. ), the annotations might have benefited from more explanations of obsolete words, and especially of changes in the meaning of words confusing to modern readers. ere are also some unfortunate errors, such as the misdating of the Rye House Plot (p. ), or the false attribution of the humorous completion of Bellemante’s verse-lines in Emperor .  to Scaramouch instead of Harlequin (p. ). Notwithstanding, the edition offers numerous fresh insights and is sure to be a valuable resource and guide for all those interested in Behn’s intriguing rewriting of commedia elements, and her amusing satire of texts about lunar travel. U  V M R Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives. Ed. by R G. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. . viii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. e essays in this ambitious volume combine depth and breadth, and include contributions from leading scholars in the fields of philosophy and literature. Its  Reviews consideration of nineteen important figures means that the volume will be of interest both to those researching individual philosophers’ work and its relationship to poetry, and also to readers wishing to gain an overview of ‘continental’ approaches. e thinkers discussed are the following: Heidegger, Benjamin, Bataille , Arendt, Gadamer, Lacan, Adorno, Sartre, Levinas, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Irigaray, Derrida (the only one not to be named in the title of the chapter devoted to him by Leslie Hill), Badiou, Nancy, Rancière, Kristeva, and Agamben. Placed first in the volume, Heidegger is the anchor because his interpretation of Hölderlin was so influential, in the French context in particular. Subsequent thinkers engage with Heidegger as they reflect on poetry; for instance, Bruno Bosteels situates Badiou’s thought ‘with and Against Heidegger’ (p. ). Among the many clear essays are James Risser’s discussion of Gadamer, for whom poetry is ‘a quiet word’ that offers intimacy in a world of estrangement (p. ), Ian James’s concise presentation of Nancy’s imprecise view of poetry, perhaps hard to pin down because it involves the senses as well as affect, and the suggestion by Cecilia Sjöholm that philosophy, for Arendt, can engage with the world ‘as if’ when it ‘listens’ to poetry...

Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver

Reviewed by: Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America by Ben Carver Christopher Ferguson (bio) Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver; pp. xviii + 292. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, £79.99, $109.99. In Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, Ben Carver describes his book as a study of the “nineteenth-century imagination of worlds that history might have produced” (1). Specifically, he analyzes the writing of “alternate histories” and identifies the wider contexts that produced them. Carver defines “alternate histories” as literary works wherein an author identifies a single point of historical divergence (example: Napoleon’s decision to begin his retreat from Moscow in September rather than October of 1812) and from this point imagines all subsequent history evolving in a new direction as a result of this change. (By leaving Russia earlier, the Grande Armée avoids decimation by the Russian winter, and Napoleon remains undefeated and rules over a massive French empire until his death from old age.) Carver contends that a wide variety of nineteenth-century authors—including British journalists, French philosophers, and American housewives—engaged in imaginative rewritings of history not only in order to imagine alternate “forms of society” or “the history of nations that might have followed,” but also as a means of “working with and often testing ideas about cycles of cause and effect that had produced the world they lived in” (5). Nineteenth-century alternate histories thus represented an important medium that allowed reflection on how new forms of knowledge, such as archaeology, astronomy, or the natural sciences, “altered the understanding of the past” (1). Carver’s book is one of several recent works interested in analyzing the production, content, and meaning of fictional histories, with Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (2018) being the most notable among them. Indeed, it is difficult to assess Carver’s study without comparing it with Gallagher’s, and Carver himself notes some important affinities between their [End Page 688] two studies. This includes their shared preference for the phrase “alternate history” as opposed to “alternative history,” the first strictly referencing “a narrative set of circumstances that history might have produced” while the second also potentially encompassing nonfictional accounts which “offer marginal perspectives normally excluded from histories of a subject” (11). Carver’s definition of what constitutes an “alternate history,” however, is more fluid and inclusive. While Gallagher draws clear distinctions between “alternate histories,” “alternate history novels,” and “counterfactual histories” on the basis of both their formal elements and contents (Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction [The University of Chicago Press, 2018], 5), Carver argues that the “boundaries between alternate and counterfactual histories are hard to establish.” Such distinctions, he contends, are “anachronistic” to the study of nineteenth-century “historical imaginaries” because none of these styles had “solidified into a form that [contemporary] writers and readers were conscious of” (12). Despite these differences of definition, Carver and Gallagher analyze many of the same works, including Louis Geoffrey-Château’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde [Napoleon and the Conquest of the World] (1836), Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie [Uchronia] (1857), Auguste Blanqui’s L’éternité par les astres [Eternity According to the Stars] (1872), Edward Everett Hale’s Hands Off (1895), and Edmund Lawrence’s It May Happen Yet: A Tale of Bonaparte’s Invasion of England (1899). These varied works are united not only by their presentation of fictional histories but also by their relative obscurity and the rarity with which they have been utilized by other scholars; the same might be noted about most of the other texts Carver examines, including Richard Whately’s Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (1819), Benjamin Disraeli’s early novel The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), an essay on astronomy and the plurality of worlds by Thomas De Quincey (“System of the Heavens As Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” [1846]), and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s feminist utopia Mizora: A Prophecy...

Nobel Lecture: Plurality of worlds in the cosmos: A dream of antiquity, a modern reality of astrophysics

The 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by James Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz. These papers are the text of the address given in conjunction with the award.

‘Ghosts from other planets’: plurality of worlds, afterlife and satire in Emanuel Swedenborg’s De Telluribus in mundo nostro solari (1758)

ABSTRACT In 1758 in London, Swedish natural philosopher and mystic theologian Emanuel Swedenborg published De Telluribus in Mundo nostro Solari (Earths in our solar system), a treatise on the plurality of worlds and life on other planets. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these topics formed a heterogenous literary genre which encompassed theology, astronomy, philosophy and satire. In De Telluribus, Swedenborg made detailed claims of communication with extraterrestrial spirits in the afterlife, through which he sought to spread his theology to new audiences. The paper will explore the role of De Telluribus in Swedenborg's career, explain its content and analyse its polarized reception. It will show that De Telluribus combined for the first time the literary codes of two popular genres during the period, namely those concerning the plurality of worlds and the dialogues of the dead. By doing so, the paper revises current scholarly understanding of Swedenborg by showcasing him as a versatile yet ill-fated recombiner of literary genres. More broadly, the paper will shed light upon previously unnoticed eighteenth-century literary interactions along with a wider overview on the reception of themes such as the plurality of worlds, mysticism and satire in Scandinavia and Germany.