"Science fiction doesn't just illuminate philosophy — in fact, the genre grew out of philosophy, and the earliest works of science fiction were philosophical texts. Here's why science fiction has its roots in philosophy, and why it's the genre of thought experiments about the universe. (...) People, especially early twenty-first century people, live in a world where strangeness lurks just beyond our frame of vision — but we can't see it by looking straight at it. When we try to turn and confront the weird and unthinkable that's always in the corner of our eye, it vanishes. In a sense, science fiction is like a prosthetic sense of peripheral vision. (...) A lot of allegories are really thought experiments, trying out a set of strange facts to see what principles you derive from them. As plenty of people have pointed out, Plato's Allegory of the Cave is the template for a million "what is reality" stories, from the works of Philip K. Dick to The Matrix. But you could almost see the cave allegory in itself as a proto-science fiction story, because of the strange worldbuilding that goes into these people who have never seen the "real" world. (...)" - Amira

"The philosophy of human nature often seems to depend on conjuring imaginary worlds, whether it be Hobbes' "nasty, brutish and short" world without laws, or Rousseau's "state of nature." A great believer in the importance of science, Hobbes sees humans as essentially mechanistic beings who are programmed to behave in a selfish fashion — and the state is a kind of artificial human that can contain us and give us better programming, in a sense. So not only can you use something like Star Trek's Holodeck to point out philosophical notions of the fallibility of the senses, and the possible falseness of reality — philosophy's own explorations of those sorts of topics are frequently kind of other-worldly. Philosophical thought experiments, like the oft-cited "state of nature," are also close kin to science fiction world building. As Susan Schneider writes in the book Science Fiction and Philosophy, "if you read science fiction writers like Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Sawyer, you already aware that some of the best science fiction tales are in fact long versions of philosophical thought experiments." - Amira