The Why of Things:
Causality in Science, Medicine, and Life
By Peter Rabins
Columbia University Press, 20th August
2013
Wow. Quite simply, wow.
This is one of the most complex, mind-boggling and ultimately satisfying
books I have read in a very long time. All of us have sometimes wondered "Why has this happened now?" when serious problems have arisen on a personal,
medical, national or global scale; this is a question which has resounded
throughout recorded history and engaged the minds of the most able and
articulate philosophers throughout the ages.
Rabins, an eminent psychiatrist, takes us on a succinct yet clear whistle-stop
tour of philosophical musings, some famous, some less well-known: from the
ancient Greeks (Democritus, Plato, Aristotle) through Scholastic thought in the
Middle Ages (Aquinas) to the modern scientific age beginning with Bacon,
Galileo, J.S. Mills, and moving on to Descartes and Hume, Vico, Kant and Popper
who observed flaws in the previous "scientific" method and proposed
further refinements to the idea of causality.
Reassessments of current theories
were made with the increase of medical knowledge by way of Sydenham, Virchow,
Pasteur and Koch. Later again, Weber and Jaspers identified two specific types
of causal logic and Weber's concept of needing different types of reasoning to
solve different sorts of causal questionings is explored in depth in the latter
chapters.
I cannot think of any other book I
have read which encompasses Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Chaos Theory , Systems
Biology , Networks (including the World Wide Web), empirical causality in the
physical and biological sciences, historical and modern epidemics,
gene/environment interaction in modern medicine, epidemiology, the benefits and
pitfalls of randomised controlled trials in medical care, narrative truth in
historiography, current opinion, inventions and modern sociology, Chernobyl,
the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 and the Fukushima
nuclear reactor disaster which are some of the events discussed and analysed
using a variety of models of causality. A later chapter deals specifically with how religions look at causality and
this was of particular interest to me and will repay intensive study.
As far as I was concerned, this was a book which is best being read in small
chunks, pondered over and the contents thoroughly digested before moving on to
the next chapter, but it was a profoundly revelatory read for me and one which
I found truly fascinating.
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