What is Sci Phi? by Jason Rennie
So what is this thing called Sci Phi? As the play on words in the name suggests, Sci Phi is a term that combines the ideas of science fiction and philosophy. I first encountered the term myself in Mark Rowland’s work, “The Philosopher at the end of the Universe”, a book I would highly recommend as a starting place to anyone wishing to delve into these ideas themselves. Now this might seem like an odd combination of things, after all what can science fiction stories of tales from the far future teach us about an ancient discipline like Philosophy? It turns out that the answer is, “A surprisingly large amount”. Many philosophical ideas have been discussed in the medium of story telling. From Plato’s conversations questioning the basis of morality in his Euthyphro dialogues, through Thomas More’s exploration of Utopia and down to Nietzsche’s stories about the mad man proclaiming the death of god and its consequences. It should be no great surprise that the modern story telling art of science fiction would likewise provide such a vehicle.
In fact we should expect science fiction to provide an excellent vehicle for these sorts of ideas because it is able to explore, through the vehicle of advanced technology and other worldly creatures, ideas that would be difficult to communicate otherwise. Consider a film like Total Recall that confronts us with questions of personal identity and what makes you the person you are, something that would be impossible to do in the way it is done without this technology that allows memories to be erased and implanted in the way they are in the film. Who is Doug Quaid and what has become of Hauser? Perhaps this idea could be explored through a regular movie set in modern times, but not so deeply, and almost definitely without all of the action we see in a film like Total Recall.
