While Setiya ultimately plunged into ideas that have taken him far away from science fiction, his work is firmly grounded in this world. From reading Lovecraft’s published correspondence, Setiya learned, “He was reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Lucretius, a bunch of philosophers, and I thought, ‘Ah, if that’s what he was reading, that’s what I should read.’” “I realized eventually what I was excited about in Lovecraft was the philosophical questions his stories were raising,” Setiya says. Though it might not seem obvious at a glance, some of those stories raise philosophical questions about our ability to comprehend the universe indeed, Lovecraft read fairly widely in philosophy. Lovecraft, the influential 20th-century American author of horror-strewn stories filled with monstrous aliens. Kieran Setiya, a philosophy professor at MIT, was drawn into the discipline in a slightly less traditional manner: “I got interested in philosophy through science fiction,” he says.Īs a teenager, growing up in England, Setiya dove into the works of H.P. Jean-Paul Sartre claimed he grew up reading his way through his grandfather’s library. The young David Hume became fascinated by Cicero’s philosophical writings. Plato, it is said, turned toward philosophy after the execution of Socrates soured him on everyday Athenian politics. Famous philosophers are often depicted as taking up the subject for reasons that, in retrospect, seem obvious.
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