A Short History of Anthropic Principles

One of the most interesting ideas of the 20th century philosophy of nature are certainly the so-called “anthropic principles”. However, it is little known that the place of their original formulation was the Extraordinary Copernicus Symposium of the International Astronomical Union, held in 1973 in Cracow to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus. This article focuses not only on the speech given by Brandon Carter at that time, to define the anthropic principles in their weak and strong version, but also shows earlier philosophical theories, which indirectly led to the formulation of the idea. Then we have shown some of the developmental lines of the antropic principles, with particular emphasis on the analyzes of the theologian and philosopher, father Michał Heller.