Philosophy
-
New collaboration: philosophy of astrobiology
This post is about a new Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant led by Peter Vickers at Durham, which I am participating in as a co-investigator. Job adverts for a three-year funded PhD student and two-year funded postdoc to follow! Astrobiology blends planetary science, astronomy, and biology, and shares their methods. But compared to scientists working…
-
Astrobiology before “astrobiologists”: a potted history
Astrobiologists aim to work out how life fits into the wider universe, uniting biology with the planetary and space sciences to draw a unified picture of the cosmos and our place in it. This ambition is, of course, far older than the discipline itself. The atomist philosopher Anaxagoras (c. 510–c. 428 BC) was perhaps the…
-
“As to what they may be”
Oh how grassy is this hopper, How this berry ripely rasps. I would never have conceived it If I weren’t conceived myself! —Wisława Szymborska Astrobiology is sometimes and with some justice disparaged as a science with only one data point. This is not to deny the wealth of geological, astronomical and biological knowledge that can…
Sean McMahon 