The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather Than Nothing Whatsoever? ed. by John F. Wippel (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 491 transplantation led to an authentic development in the Church’s theology (chap. 14). Smith reasons that “the contours of the debate about the morality of [living organ transplantation] suggest how theologians may serve the Church in assessing various bioethical issues” (304). Though I have limited myself here to summarizing and responding to a handful of the essays in this volume, each of the essays was stimulating and thought provoking. The book raises all the right questions in the field and provides reasonable responses to them from the wealth of the Catholic moral tradition. NICANOR PIER GIORGIO AUSTRIACO, O.P. Providence College Providence, Rhode Island The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather Than Nothing Whatsoever? Edited by JOHN F. WIPPEL. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011. Pp. 261. $60.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-08132 -1863-2. In the third book of his Metaphysics, Aristotle explores various difficulties that frame the science he is pursuing. Despite their relative intractability these aporiai effectively determine the unfolding of his investigation. They continually require us to reappraise the insights of one line of inquiry in the light of what we learn from another. To some extent this pattern itself has come to characterize significant parts of the Western philosophical canon. Our investigation of ultimate questions advances, not by the continuous accumulation of results, but by a series of complementary undertakings. By its title, The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather Than Nothing Whatsoever? recommends itself as a contribution to the kind of study that Aristotle introduced. Though not explicitly investigated by Aristotle, the ultimate why question has continually garnered attention throughout history. Msgr. John Wippel, the work’s editor, notes that an investigation of how things are ought to be supplemented by a consideration of why things are present in order to receive our attention. This volume of eleven essays, arising from a meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America, is not a mere collection of papers; it is an integrated whole that considers a particular question from complementary perspectives. The first eight essays explore the answers of key historical figures. In addition to their chronological sequence, these essays are sufficiently interwoven so as to introduce a number of themes that develop over the course of the work. Where the first four are essentially organized around the diffusiveness of God’s BOOK REVIEWS 492 goodness, the next four appraise this claim from the perspective of subsequent rationalism and idealism. The last three essays are contemporary assessments of some of the implications that have been suggested along the way. The benefit of these essays is that while they invite us to consider the ultimate why question through the minds of history’s most important thinkers, they further equip us do so in a more thoughtful manner as we appraise the augmented insights of the various approaches. Though their brevity might seem an injustice to the question at hand, the resources they afford in the notes and bibliography certainly equip us to pursue the question further on our own. In the first chapter Lloyd Gerson outlines the Platonic tradition. Noting that Parmenides would find the ultimate why question to be incoherent since he believes nonbeing to be unintelligible, he proposes Plato’s dissatisfaction with Aristotle’s account of change, as a means to explain what has being. Gerson next recalls that while the Idea of the Good “provides being (einai) and ousia to that which is knowable” (31), it still transcends entities that only participate in ousia. In Plotinus’s appropriation of the Symposium’s definition of love as the desire to posses the good eternally, we arrive at a complete First Principle, the One or Good which loves itself. Thus, Gerson describes how the West came to understand that there is something rather than nothing because of “the selfdiffusiveness of the Good” (40). Once introduced this principle receives a further explication in subsequent thinkers. In chapter 2 May Sim takes up creation ex nihilo as considered in Chinese philosophy. In responding to Robert Neville who suggests that this ought to transcend the limits of determinate beings, Sim cautions that this presumes...