Content area
Full text
RESCHER, Nicholas. Axiogenesis: An Essay in Metaphysical Optimalism. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2010. xi + 223 pp. Cloth, $75.00- Why does there exist anything at all? To Rescher, it is "as fundamental, profound and serious a problem as any that philosophy affords." His efforts to solve it date back to an essay in 1966: "Evaluative Metaphysics." They include The Riddle of Existence (1984), Nature and Understanding (2000), and now this fascinating new book. All involve what he calls "ultimate explanation of a type that goes back to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and beyond him to Plato," and the theory "that the good (merit, being 'for the best') exerts a creative impulse," an idea found "in Plato and Aristotle, in neo-Platonism, in Christian scholasticism, and indeed in some contemporary thinkers as well".
Basic to this theory is that things need not be explained always through pointing to other things. Instead, the entire kingdom of things could have its reason in the field of possibilities. Possibilities sometimes have value, providing what Rescher calls an "axiological" ground for them to exist. Others have said "ethical"; the realm of things, they write, may exist simply because of the ethical need for it, and ail the goods with which Ethics deals can be called "ethically needful."...