A Living World of Purpose and Meaning

摘要

David Haig, an eminent geneticist at Harvard, begins his new book, From Darwin to Derrida, with an enticing invitation to follow him as he explains "how a physical world of matter in motion, of material and efficient causes, gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning, of final and formal causes." The four kinds of causes Haig mentions are the venerable Aristotelian instruments of explanation, for which he provides brief definitions: "The material cause was the stuff out of which a thing was made; the formal cause was that which made of this stuff one kind of thing rather than another; the efficient cause was that which set a thing in motion; and the final cause was the purpose or end (telos), that for the sake of which the thine existed."