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Actualism is the philosophical position which denies both that possible-but-nonactual objects exist and that there are nonexistent objects which might have existed. Philosophers have postulated such objects in the attempt to describe the features of the world that are responsible for the truth of claims which assert what might be the case (or about what might have been been the case). Consider, for example, the true claim that `There might be aliens' or `It is possible that there are aliens' (where `alien' simply means any non-Earth-based inhabitant of the universe). Even if there are no aliens, it seems true that there might be aliens. The possibility is still a genuine one even if there are no actual aliens. (After all, life might evolve somewhere else in the universe.) So what grounds the fact that there might be aliens when there are no aliens?
The theory was first clearly expressed in 1749 by G. L. L. Buffon (1707 - 1788), and was the essential principle of uniformitarianism as presented in 1830 by , C. Lyell (1797 - 1875).
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