Introduction

What is there?  Why does the world exist?  Why is there something and not nothing?  These are basic questions.  They may be asked by a young child or by an elderly sage.  There are no obvious answers.  The questions may seem irritating (when asked by a child) or exasperating (when asked by a sage).  But somehow we human beings cannot help but ask them. 

These questions are philosophical questions.  Philosophy typically deals with ultimate and often impossible questions.  Religion deals with them.  Science, now, has begun to deal with these questions too.  It deals with them at the very limits of scientific knowledge.  We can, if we are practical, ignore them, so that we can get about our daily business.  We can dismiss philosophy as airy nonsense.  We can trust in religion to provide comforting answers, on the one hand, or dismiss religion as pretentious superstition, on the other hand.  We can look to science for answers, be impressed by its profundity, but despair of understanding its complexities.  However we react, we can never fully ignore the ultimate questions. 

Writing in the fourth century BCE, Aristotle saw all of his philosophical  predecessors as pursuing the question, What is being?  And he, modestly, was willing to share with his readers the answer to that question (Metaphysics IV.1, VII.1).  He certainly succeeded in offering a rich catalogue of distinctions for identifying the various senses and aspects of being.  But his efforts only provoked more discussion about being. 

So why should we waste our time studying being?  Because, in the process of pursuing being, Aristotle and his predecessors, and his successors, gave rise to natural science.  And natural science gave rise to scientific technology.  And the pursuit of being also gave rise to the social sciences, studying everything from mental phenomena to the structure of society to the principles of government to money-making.  And the reason we are not sitting around campfires and reciting legends, but driving automobiles, riding in airplanes, and carrying around devices with which we can communicate with people around the world, record movies, and search remote databases for facts and figure—is scientific technology, driven by the pursuit of being.  Without a knowledge of the atom, the electron, the photon, and electromagnetism, without power stations and communication towers and satellites, we might be striking stones together to make fire.  

The existence of the atom was posited around 450 BCE by a philosopher, Leucippus.  The existence of atoms was scientifically proved in 1905 CE by a theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein.  Sometime between Leucippus and Einstein philosophy turned into science.  And sometime since 1905 science turned into technology producing pocket-sized supercomputers. 

It is easy to take our present godlike powers for granted.  But perhaps we should not.  Perhaps we should think about being.