Purpose of It All

by Stanley L. Jaki

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0895267403
• ISBN13: 9780895267405
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Gateway Editions
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Purposely denying purpose?

It's been a couple years since I read this book (admittedly, twice!), but because I've read so much else by Fr. Jaki, the specific contents of this volume kind of "blur together" with much else that he's written. Even so, if you have any interest in Jaki's work (and if you are into the history of science and ideas, you should!), this is a more unique work, in that it deals with biology, rather than his usual areas of expertise, physics and astronomy. This book begins by showing historically how various conceptions of purpose (such as technology, Progress, secularism, etc.) either collapsed without a transcendent grounding, or kept contradicting themselves by denying a need for "higher purpose" and then constantly fabricating one to get by. Basically, this is a multi-chapter meditation on one of Jaki's favorite quotations (by Whitehead), to the effect that those who make it their purpose in life to prove there is no purpose in life, would make for an interesting topic of study. Jaki took Whitehead up on that "would" and did study the incoherence of anti-teleology. Let the reader be advised that, while Jaki strongly objects to the ideological (scientistic) trappings with which "evolution by natural selection" is encumbered in our day, he is neither an advocate of fundamentalist "creationism" (except of course for the Act of Creation itself!) nor an uncritical supporter of Darwinian theory. Basically, Jaki denies "purpose" has any place in experimental science, since that would not only illegitimately conscript science to ground what is actually a spiritual and moral reality but also would be to succumb to the illusion that science can "prove" there is no purpose in the world. Purpose is not a strictly scientific concept, and so we should neither expect science to "give us hope" nor to "sober us up" about the meaningless of life. This is, as I hinted at above, but a biological and anthropological angle on one of the keys to Jaki's oeuvre, namely, the proper (and often humbling) LIMITS of science. At the same time, any scientist (or scientismatic, as I call devotees of scientism, one of Jaki's arch-nemeses) who denies on philosophical grounds that purpose is unreal or incoherent, contradicts herself by purposefully devoting her own life to science, to irreligion, etc. Jaki is not as explicit about it as I think he ought have been, but I read him say elsewhere that this book is more or less an updated continuation of É. Gilson's -From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again-, which Jaki motivated into an English translation and for which he wrote a foreword (Notre Dame University Press, reissued by Ignatius Press, sans Jaki's foreword). Be sure to read that book by Gilson in conjunction with this volume by Jaki. The Gilsonian and Duhemian imprint upon Jaki's work is no secret, and it is most evident in a book like this. The typical reader interested in "the evolution debate" would probably want more direct metaphysical and paleological-biological a

The Cold Fish of Reason

Every man should well remember the first time a female slapped him in the face. The universe we are learning about, it is proposed as a theory, has no purpose. The title of Jaki's book is the slap with a cold fish in the face of those who propose such a theory. Jaki seems to have read and have at his fingertips anything and everything that has been written about sciences. He purports to be a historian of science and he is that and more. He is acquainted also with philosophy and theology and his contention is that the science we have is a result of the free will of humans-a concept lacking in nearly all of the other civilizations where science, as we know it, never arose or progressed to the extent that we know it. Almost in passing he reveals Duhem's undermining of the Enlightenment Myth, that is, the medieval origins of Newtonian science with but small words for Buridan and Oresme (names mostly unknown to students today but upon whose shoulders Copernicus perched)(they were a couple of hundred years earlier than he). Giving credit is always tough and Jaki's footnotes are very amusing on this score although in later and earlier works he gives full credit to Duhem's suppressed writings (Duhem was a Catholic in France-nuff said)which have only come available in the past 50 years. Most advances are incremental in any field which is not to take away from those few men of genius who can put the findings into a theory that approaches reality or who have vision such that they can see those isolated facts in a new way. Ultimately, Jaki is doing metaphysics, I think, and it is about time more attention was paid to that field. Of course, he has a doctorate in Physics so it isn't just prattle. He writes well, the footnotes alone are worth the price of the book, but, once hooked you will find yourself reading other works of his. Schall recommends in particular, The Road of Science and the Ways to God. They were originally the Gifford Lectures in the 1970's but are very readable by the average person.