Una passeggiata in mondi e semi-mondi possibili

The object of this article is a particular type of fictional world characterizing a literary genre whose existence and specificities have recently been pointed out by Quentin Meillassoux, namely the extroscientific world. As we shall see, its interest is twofold: metaphysical, because of the difficulty involved in conceiving rigorous examples of it, and literary, because it is hard to find writers who have actually used this type of world as an environment for their stories, and have thus practised the corresponding type of genre. In this article, I will compare the resources offered to the imaginative creation of worlds by three authors: Meillassoux himself, David Lewis, and Edmund Husserl, and I will argue that, thanks to the notion of life-world, Husserl’s thought proves more effective in producing clear and rigorous examples of extro-scientific worlds (or semi-worlds).