Abstract

The flyer accompanying Metaphysics: the Elements describes it as The English tradition, on the whole, from its beginnings in Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham, in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, has been unsympathetic to teleological explanations, preferring the procedures of what came to be called empirical science; and it is to this tradition that Aune's book clearly belongs. It is hardly a comprehensive survey of what the traditional metaphysicians themselves considered their key concepts, nor is it any more comprehensive a survey of contemporary metaphysics unless one restricts this to Anglo-American analytic metaphysics as Aune implicitly does: there is not a single reference to Nietzsche or Heidegger; Whitehead is mentioned only briefly and only with reference to the Principia ; and the discussion of time makes no reference to Husserl or Bergson. Earlier continental philosophers fare slightly better: Hegel is mentioned twice, in passing, and Schopenhauer is dismissed with contempt in three lines. No book that takes such an attitude toward the teleological traditions of metaphysics can properly describe itself (or--