Abstract

Elephants need no less than twenty-two months. But what are elephants in comparison with reason, whose incubation took more than twenty-three centuries, beginning with the dawn of western philosophy in the sixth century BCE and ending in Leibniz’s formulation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Carraud’s fascinating book tells the story of the very last stages of this Heideggerian plot, which is also the story of the rise and fall of the efficient cause in early modern philosophy and of the rehabilitation of the final cause. The chronological frame of the book is roughly the century between Suarez’s Disputationes metaphysicae and Leibniz’s De rerum originatione radicali and Les 24 thèses métaphysiques.