Tuesday, February 17, 2009

the Evolution vs. ID debate in antiquity

I saw a review of David Sedley's Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity in Touchstone.

Sedley is a professor of ancient philosophy at Cambridge. Here's the description of the book from the website:

The world is configured in ways that seem systematically hospitable to life forms, especially the human race. Is this the outcome of divine planning or simply of the laws of physics? Ancient Greeks and Romans famously disagreed on whether the cosmos was the product of design or accident. In this book, David Sedley examines this question and illuminates new historical perspectives on the pantheon of thinkers who laid the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Versions of what we call the "creationist" option were widely favored by the major thinkers of classical antiquity, including Plato, whose ideas on the subject prepared the ground for Aristotle's celebrated teleology. But Aristotle aligned himself with the anti-creationist lobby, whose most militant members—the atomists—sought to show how a world just like ours would form inevitably by sheer accident, given only the infinity of space and matter. This stimulating study explores seven major thinkers and philosophical movements enmeshed in the debate: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the atomists, Aristotle, and the Stoics.

The reviewer at Touchstone, Patrick Gray, observes that:

Sedley succeeds in treating both sides with equal sympathy. He does not always succeed in his attempt to address an audience of non-specialists, a pardonable offense given the complexity of the subject matter.

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