Abstract

The range of this volume, and thus the task especially of its editor, is enormous: to confront the question of teleology from Plato through Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas’s commentaries on the Physics, Copernicus, Machiavelli, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, and Newton, to Kant, Hegel, and then to Einstein, and to recent theories of anthropic-principle cosmology or else versions of the many-worlds cosmology of chance and necessity, and then to Niels Bohr and quantum mechanics, and finally to the problem of current molecular-biological theories of evolution.