Arthur Lovejoy was an American historian who in The Great Chain of Being¹ (1936) argued that post-Copernican ideas about extraterrestrial life "were chiefly derivative from philosophical and theological premises" rather than from observational evidence or scientific reasoning.

 

Reference

1. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1971) (first published 1936).