Since metaphysics is the study of what exists, one might expectmetaphysicians to have little to say about the limit case in whichnothing exists. But ever since Parmenides in the fifth century BCE,there has been rich commentary on whether an empty world is possible,whether there are vacuums, and about the nature of privations andnegation.

This survey starts with nothingness at a global scale and thenexplores local pockets of nothingness. Let’s begin with a question thatMartin Heidegger famously characterized as the most fundamental issueof philosophy.

• 1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
• 2. Is there at most one empty world?
• 3. Can there be an explanatory framework for the question?
• 4. The restriction to concrete entities
• 5. The contingency dilemma
• 6. The intuitive primacy of positive truths
• 7. The subtraction argument
• 8. Ontological neutrality
• 9. The problem of multiple nothings
• 10. Is thereany nothingness?
• 11. Phenomenological aspects of nothingness
• 12. Animal Cognition of Absences
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Well, why not? Why expect nothing rather than something? Noexperiment could support the hypothesis ‘There is nothing’because any observation obviously implies the existence of anobserver.

Is there anya priori support for ‘There isnothing’? One might respond with a methodological principle thatpropels the empty world to the top of the agenda. For instance, manyfeel that whoever asserts the existence of something has the burden ofproof. If an astronomer says there is water at the south pole of theMoon, then it is up to him to provide data in support of the lunarwater. If we were not required to have evidence to back our existentialclaims, then a theorist who fully explained the phenomena with one setof things could gratuitously add an extra entity, say, a pebble outside ourlight cone. Werecoil from such add-ons. To prevent the intrusion of superfluousentities, one might demand that metaphysicians start with the emptyworld and admit only those entities that have credentials. This is theentry requirement imposed by René Descartes. He clears everything out and thenonly lets back in what can beproved to exist.

St. Augustine had more conservative counsel: we should not start atthe beginning, nor at the end, but where we are, in the middle. Wereach a verdict about the existence of controversial things byassessing how well these entities would harmonize with the existence ofbetter established things. If we start from nothing, we lack thebearings needed to navigate forward. Conservatives, coherentists andscientific gradualists all cast a suspicious eye on ‘Why is theresomething rather than nothing?’.

Most contemporary philosophers feel entitled to postulate whateverentities are indispensable to their best explanations of well acceptedphenomena. They feel the presumption of non-existence is only plausiblefor particular existence claims. Since the presumption only applies ona case by case basis, there is no grand methodological preference foran empty world. Furthermore, there is no burden of proof when everybodyconcedes the proposition under discussion. Even a solipsist agreesthere is at least one thing!

A more popular way to build a presumption in favor of nothingness isto associate nothingness with simplicity and simplicity withlikelihood. The first part of this justification is plausible.‘Nothing exists’ is simple in the sense of being an easy toremember generalization. Consider a test whose questions have the form‘Doesx exist?’. The rule ‘Always answerno!’ is unsurpassably short and comprehensive.

InLes Misérables, Victor Hugo contrasts universalnegation with universal affirmation:

All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduceseverything to the word ‘no.’ To ‘no’ there isonly one answer and that is ‘yes.’ Nihilism has nosubstance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does notexist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more byaffirmation than by bread. (1862, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 6).

As far as simplicity is concerned, there is a tie between the nihilistic rule‘Always answer no!’ and the inflationary rule ‘Alwaysanswer yes!’. Neither rule makes for serious metaphysics.

Even if ‘Nothing exists’ were the uniquely simplestpossibility (as measured by memorability), why should we expect thatpossibility to be actual? In a fair lottery, we assign the sameprobability of winning to the ticket unmemorably designated 4,169,681as to the ticket memorably labeled 1,111,111.

Indeed, the analogy with a lottery seems to dramatically reverse thepresumption of non-existence. If there is only one empty world and manypopulated worlds, then a random selection would lead us to expect apopulated world.

Peter van Inwagen (1996) has nurtured this statistical argument. Inan infinite lottery, the chance that a given ticket is the winner is 0.Van Inwagen reasons that since there are infinitely many populatedworlds, the probability of a populated world is equal to 1. Althoughthe empty world is not impossible, it is as improbable as anything canbe!

For the sake of balanced reporting, van Inwagen should acknowledgethat, by his reasoning, the actual world is also as improbable asanything can be. What really counts here is the probability of‘There is something’ as opposed to ‘There isnothing’.

Is this statistical explanation scientific? Scientists stereotypicallyoffer causal explanations. These are not feasible given the comprehensive reading of‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’. However,Elliott Sober (1983) argues that scientists also accept “equilibriumexplanations”. These explain the actual situation as the outcome ofmost or all of the possible initial states. There is no attempt totrace the path by which the actual initial state developed into thepresent situation. It suffices that the result is invariant. Why do Ihave enough oxygen to breathe even though all the oxygen moleculescould have congregated in one corner my room? The physicist explainsthat while this specific arrangement is just as likely as any other,the overwhelming majority of arrangements do not segregateoxygen.

2. Is there at most one empty world?

Most philosophers would grant Peter van Inwagen’s premise that thereis no more than one empty world. They have been trained to model theempty world on the empty set. Since a set is defined in terms of itsmembers, there can be at most one empty set.

However, medieval philosophers differentiated empty worlds by thepower of places within those worlds (Grant 1981). The Condemnation of1277 forced Aristotelian philosophers to acknowledge the possibilityof a void (to respect God’s omnipotence and the Christian doctrine ofcreation from nothing). Most thinkers retained Aristotle’s assumptionthat there was a unique center of the universe. If rocks wereintroduced into such a world, they would all head toward their naturallocation at the center of the universe. (Aristotle uses this point toprovide a spectacular explanation of why there are not two earths;they would have collided!) However, Nicole Oresme imagined a worldwithout any center. He predicted the rocks would head toward eachother. Since air, fire, earth, and water each had their own places inAristotle’s physics, fourteenth century philosophers could imagineworlds that differed as to which of these places to retain. The voidwas rarely pictured as homogeneous.

Aristotle’s world was self-governed. Objects have powers thatcollectively explain the order of the universe. Thinkers in theAbrahamic tradition replaced Aristotle’s invisible hand explanationwith God’s hidden hand. God dictated laws of nature to which He madeperiodic adjustments (like clockmakers who regularly serviced theircreations, correcting the accumulating errors). Reflection on God’sperfection eventually made these divine interventions seem like animpious slight against God’s foreknowledge. After the miracles wererescinded, God Himself was retired. What was left were the laws ofnature. Since there was no longer any constraint on what laws had tobe, the actual world looks highly contingent. At first blush, thisvindicates van Inwagen’s probabilistic argument. But the contingencyof laws also raises the possibility of individuating empty worlds bytheir laws (Carroll 1994, 64). For instance, Isaac Newton’s first lawof motion says an undisturbed object will continue in motion in astraight line. Some previous physicists suggested that such an objectwill slow down and tend to travel in a circle. This empty worlddiffers from the Newtonian empty world because differentcounterfactual statements are true of it.

If variation in empty worlds can be sustained by differences in thelaws that apply to them, there will be infinitely many empty worlds.The gravitational constant of an empty world can equal any real numberbetween 0 and 1, so there are more than countably many empty worlds.Indeed, any order of infinity achieved by the set of populated possibleworlds will be matched by the set of empty worlds.

John Heil (2013) is bemused by this War of the Possible Worlds. Havinggiven up the Law Maker, we should give up the laws. Once we return toa self-governed world, there will be no temptation to see the world asa lucky accident. After all, we do not literally see states of affairsas contingent. Contingency, unlike color or shape, is notperceptible. Nor is there any presumption for regarding states ofaffairs as contingent. According to Heil, ‘Why is theresomething rather than nothing?’ owes its urgency to a partisanbackground theory, not a neutral arbiter such as perception ormethodology.

Although possible worlds became intensely popular among analyticphilosophers after revolutionary advances in modal logic in the 1960s,they receive little attention from existentialists. Their discussionof objects is more in line with powers ontology advocated byHeil. Indeed, some existentialists picture nothingness as a kind offorce that impedes each object’s existence. Since there is somethingrather than nothing, any such nihilating force cannot have actuallygone unchecked. What could have blocked it? Robert Nozick (1981, 123)toys with an interpretation of Heidegger in which this nihilatingforce is self-destructive. This kind of double-negation is depicted inthe Beatles’s movieYellow Submarine. There is a creaturethat zooms around like a vacuum cleaner, emptying everything in itspath. When this menace finally turns on itself, a richly populatedworld pops into existence.

Some cultures have creation myths reminiscent ofYellowSubmarine. Heidegger would dismiss them as inappropriatelyhistorical. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’is not about the origin of the world. Increasing the scientificrespectability of the creation story (as with the Big Bang hypothesis)would still leave Heidegger objecting that the wrong question is beingaddressed.

3. Can there be an explanatory framework for the question?

Some disagree with van Inwagen’s assumption that each possibleworld is as likely as any other (Kotzen 2013). There have been metaphysical systemsthat favor less populated worlds.

Indeed, the original purveyor of possible worlds, Gottfried Leibniz,pictured possible things as competing to become actual. The more athing competes with other things, the more likely that there will besomething that stops it from becoming real. The winners in Leibniz’sstruggle for existence are cooperative. They uniquely fit the nicheformed by other things. This key hole into existence implicitlyconveys information about everything. The little bit that is not,tells us about all that there is.

On the one hand, this metaphysical bias in favor of simplicity isheartening because it suggests that the actual world is not too complexfor human understanding. Scientists have penetrated deeply into thephysical world with principles that emphasize parsimony anduniformity: Ockham’s razor, the least effort principle, the anthropicprinciple, etc.

On the other hand, Leibniz worried that the metaphysical bias forsimplicity, when driven to its logical conclusion, yields theembarrassing prediction that there is nothing. After all, an emptyworld would be free of objects trying to elbow each other out. It isthe world that requires the least effort to produce (Just do nothing!) andsustain (Continue doing nothing!). So why is there something ratherthan nothing?

Leibniz’s worry requires a limbo between being andnon-being. If the things in this limbo state do not really exist, howcould they prevent anything else from existing?

Leibniz’s limbo illustrates an explanatory trap. To explain whysomething exists, we standardly appeal to the existence of somethingelse. There are mountain ranges on Earth because there are plates onits surface that slowly collide and crumple up against each other.There are rings around Saturn because there is an immense quantity ofrubble orbiting that planet. This pattern of explanation is notpossible for ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’.For instance, if we answer ‘There is something because theUniversal Designer wanted there to be something’, then ourexplanation takes for granted the existence of the Universal Designer.Someone who poses the question in a comprehensive way will not grantthe existence of the Universal Designer as a starting point.

If the explanation cannot begin with some entity, then it is hard tosee how any explanation is feasible. Some philosophers conclude‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ isunanswerable. They think the question stumps us by imposing animpossible explanatory demand, namely,Deduce the existence ofsomething without using any existential premises. Logicians shouldfeel no more ashamed of their inability to perform this deduction thangeometers should feel ashamed at being unable to square the circle.

David Hume offers a consolation prize: we might still be able toexplain the existence of each event even if it is impossible to explaineverything all together. Suppose that the universe is populated with aninfinite row of dominoes. The fall of each domino can be explained bythe fall of its predecessor.

But what is responsible for the arrangement to begin with? Why isthere anything in our domain of discourse? There is a tradition ofdenying that this kind of comprehensive questioning iscoherent. Principles that apply within a system need not be applicableto the system itself.

Is there a world? Can worlds be counted in the way presupposed bymodal metaphysics? Doubts about absolute generality can descend fromlogical theorizing about quantification (Rayo 2013). They can alsobubble up from suspicions about abstraction (Maitzen 2012). A sortalsuch as KITTEN tells us the nature of a thing, thereby supplyingcriteria for counting and persistence. THING is a dummy sortal. Howmany things do you have when you have a capped pen? The questioncannot be answered because you have not been given criteria governingwhether the cap and the pen count as separate objects. All questionsabout existence must be relativized to sorts. Consequently, thequestion of why there is something rather than nothing isincomplete. Once we remedy the incompleteness with a sortal, thequestion will be answered by science.

Empiricists such as Hume deny that the existence of anything could beproved by reason alone. Rationalists have been more optimistic. Manyhave offereda priori proofs of God’s existence. Such a proof would doubleas an explanation of why there is something. If God exists, thensomething exists. After all, God is something.

But would God be the right sort of something? If we are only seekingana priori proof of something (anything at all!),then why not rest content with a mathematical demonstration that thereexists an integer between a square and a cube?There must existsuch an integer because 25 is a square and 27 is a cube and only oneinteger can be between 25 and 27. Therefore, something exists.Why does this come off as a mathematical joke?

4. The restriction to concrete entities

Van Inwagen’s answer is that we are actually interested inconcrete things. A grain of sand, a camel, and an oasis areeach concrete entities. They are part of the causal order. Incontrast, abstract entities (numbers, sets, possible worlds) do notcause anything. Those who adopt the principle that only causes arereal will become nominalists; everything is concrete.

A second characterization of concrete entities is in terms oflocatability; a concrete entity has a position in space or time. Sinceconcrete entities are situated, they have boundaries with theirenvironment. (The only exception would be an entity that took up allspace or all time, say Nature.)

Admittedly, points in space and time have locations. But concreteentities are only accidentally where and when they are. All concreteentities have intrinsic properties (which make their boundariesnatural rather than conventional, say Efird and Stoneham (2005,314)). Their natures are not exhausted by their relationships withother things. Max Black imagines twin iron spheres in an otherwiseempty universe. The spheres are distinct yet have the samerelationships and the same intrinsic properties.

All material things are concrete but some concrete things might beimmaterial. Shadows and holes have locations and durations but theyare not made of anything material. There is extraneous light inshadows and extraneous matter in holes; but these are contaminantsrather than constituents. Cracks can spread, be counted, andconcealed. Once we acknowledge the existence of cracks, we get anunexpected transcendental explanation of why there issomething:If there is nothing then there is an absence ofanything. Therefore, there exists something (either a positiveconcrete entity or an absence).

Ontological pluralists do not dismiss this proof as sophistry. KrisMcDaniel (2013, 277) thinks the proof is trivially correct. To addressa more interesting question, McDaniel follows Aristotle’s principlethat there are many ways of being. From the pluralist’s perspective,debate over whether holes exist is equivocal. The friends of absencesuse a broad sense of being. The enemies of holes speak from a higherlink in the chain of being. From this altitude, holes depend on theirhosts and so cannot be as real. Alexius Meinong’s talk of subsistencealludes to the lowest level of being. “Why does anythingsubsist?” is a perfectly legitimate question, according toMcDaniel.

If there are souls or Cartesian minds, then they will also qualify asimmaterial, concrete entities. Although they do not take up space,they take up time. An idealist such as George Berkeley could ask‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ even thoughhe was convinced that material things are not possible.

William James denied that his defense of parapsychology provided aresource for answering, ‘How comes the world to be here at allinstead of the non-entity which might be imagined in itsplace?’ Philosophy, be it natural or supernatural, can make noprogress on this issue “for from nothing to being there is nological bridge” (1911, 40). James concludes: “The questionof being is the darkest in all philosophy. All of us are beggars here,and no school can speak disdainfully of another or give itselfsuperior airs” (1911, 46).

Although all concrete things are in space or time, neither space nortime are concrete things. Where would space be? When would time occur?These questions can only be answered if space were contained inanother higher space. Time would be dated within another time. Sincethe same questions can be posed for higher order space and higherorder time, we would face an infinite regress.

There is no tradition of wondering ‘Why is there space andtime?’. One reason is that space and time seem like a frameworkfor there being any contingent things.

Absolutists think of the framework as existing independently of whatit frames. For instance, Newton characterized space as an eternal,homogeneous, three dimensional container of infinite extent. Hebelieved that the world was empty of objects for an infinite periodprior to creation (setting aside an omnipresent God). An empty worldwould merely be a continuation of what creation interrupted.

Others think the framework depends on what it frames. Like Leibniz,Albert Einstein pictured (or “pictured”) space as anabstraction from relations between objects. Consequently, space canbe described with the same metaphors we use for family trees. Maybespace grows bigger. Maybe space is curved or warped or hasholes. There is much room to wonder why space has the properties that ithas. But since space is an abstraction from objects, answers to anyriddles about space reduce to questions about objects. One can wonder whythere is space. But this is only to wonder why there are objects.

5. The contingency dilemma

All concrete things appear to be contingent beings. For instance,the planet Earth would not have existed had the matter which now constitutesour solar system formed, as usual, two stars instead of one. If noconcrete thing is a necessary being, then no concrete thing can explain theexistence of concrete things.

Even if God is not concrete, proof of His existence would raise hopeof explaining the existence of concrete things. For instance, theGenesis creation story suggests that God made everythingwithout relying any antecedent ingredients. The story also suggeststhat God had a reason to create. If this account could be corroboratedwe would have an explanation of why there are some concretethings.

This divine explanation threatens to over-explain the data. Giventhat God is a necessary being and that the existence of Godnecessitates the existence of Earth, then Earth would be anecessary being rather than a contingent being.

The dilemma was generalized by William Rowe (1975). Consider all thecontingent truths. The conjunction of all these truths is itself acontingent truth. On the one hand, this conjunction cannot be explainedby any contingent truth because the conjunction already contains allcontingent truths; the explanation would be circular. On the otherhand, this conjunction cannot be explained by a necessary truth becausea necessary truth can only imply other necessary truths. This dilemmasuggests that ‘Why are there any contingent beings?’ isimpossible to answer.

Rowe presupposes that an answer would have to beadeductive explanation. If there are ‘inferences tothe best explanation’ or inductive explanations, then theremight be a way through the horns of Rowe’s dilemma.

There also remains hope that Rowe’s dilemma can be bypassed by showingthat the empty world is not a genuine possibility. Then the retort to‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is‘There is no alternative to there beingsomething!’.

‘There might be nothing’ is false when readepistemically. (Roughly, a proposition is epistemically possible if itis consistent with everything that is known.) For we know thatsomethingactually exists and knowledge of actualityprecludes all rival epistemic possibilities. But when read metaphysically,‘There might be nothing’ seems true. So ‘Why isthere something rather than nothing?’ is, so far, a livequestion.

The question is not undermined by thea priori status ofknowledge that something exists. (I knowa priori thatsomething exists because I knowa priori that I exist andknow this entails ‘Something exists’.) Knowledge, evena priori knowledge, that something is actually true iscompatible with ignorance as to how it could be true.

Residual curiosity is possible even when the proposition is known tobe a necessary truth. Areductio ad absurdum proof that 1− 1/3 + 1/5 − 1/7 + … converges to π/4 mightpersuade one that there is no alternative without illuminating how itcould be true. For this brute style of proof does not explain how πwandered into the solution. (Reductio ad absurdum just showsa contradiction would follow if the conclusion were not true.) Thisraises the possibility that even a logical demonstration of themetaphysical necessity of ‘Something exists’ might stillleave us asking why there is something rather than nothing (thoughthere would no longer be the wonder about the accidentality of therebeing something). This leads Andrew Brenner (2016) to deny that‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ isrestricted to contingent entities. Brenner argues the question ishighly ambiguous. At best there is only a family resemblance betweenthe questions under discussion. What appears to be disagreement is toooften a verbal dispute.

6. The intuitive primacy of positive truths

Henri Bergson maintained that nothingness is precluded by thepositive nature of reality. The absence of a female pope is not a brutefact. ‘There is not a female pope’ is made true by apositive fact such as the Catholic Church’s regulation that all priestsbe men and the practice of drawing popes from the priesthood. Once wehave the positive facts and the notion of negation, we can derive allthe negative facts. ‘There is nothing’ would be acontingent, negative fact. But then it would have to be grounded onsome positive reality. That positive reality would ensure that there issomething rather than nothing.

Human beings have a strong intuition that positive truths, such as‘Elephants are huge’ are more fundamental than negativetruths such as ‘Elephants do not jump’. The robustness ofthis tendency makes negative things objects of amusement. Consider theProfessor’s remark during his chilly banquet in Lewis Carroll’sSylvie and Bruno Concluded.

“I hope you’ll enjoy the dinner—such as it is; andthat you won’t mind the heat—such as it isn’t.”

The sentencesounded well, but somehow I couldn’t quiteunderstand it … (chapter 22)

How can we perceive absences? They seem causally inert and so notthe sort of thing that we could check empirically. Negative truths seemredundant; there are no more truths than those entailed by theconjunction of all positive truths. The negative truths seempsychological; we only assert negative truths to express a frustratedexpectation. When Jean Paul Sartre (1969, 41) arrives late for hisappointment with Pierre at the cafe, he sees the absence of Pierre butnot the absence of the Duke of Wellington.

Philosophers have had much trouble vindicating any of theseintuitions. Bertrand Russell (1985) labored mightily to reduce negativetruths to positive truths. Russell tried paraphrasing ‘The cat isnot on the mat’ as ‘There is a state of affairsincompatible with the cat being on the mat’. But this paraphraseis covertly negative; it uses ‘incompatible’ which meansnot compatible. He tried modeling ‘Notp’ as an expression of disbelief thatp. But‘disbelief’ means believing that something isnotthe case. Is it even clear that absences are causally inert? Trappedminers are killed by the absence of oxygen. In the end Russellsurrendered his intuition that reality is positive. In a famouslecture at Harvard, Russell concluded that irreducibly negative factsexist. He reports this nearly caused a riot.

Were it not for the threat to social order, one might stand theintuition on its head: Negative truths are more fundamental thanpositive truths. From a logical point of view, there is greater promisein a reduction of positive truths to negative truths. Positive truthscan be analyzed as the negations of negative truths or perhaps asfrustrated disbelief. Positive truths would then be the redundanthanger-ons, kept in circulation by our well-documented difficulty incoping with negative information. Think of photographic negatives. Theyseem less informative than positive prints. But since the prints aremanufactured from the negatives, the negatives must be merely moredifficult for us to process.

As difficult as negation might be psychologically, it is easier towork with than the alternatives suggested by Henry Sheffer. In 1913,he demonstrated that all of the logical connectives can be defined interms of the dual of conjunction, now known as NAND (short for NOTAND). Sheffer translates ‘p NANDq’ as‘either not p or notq’.‘Notp’ is defined as ‘pNANDp’. Sheffer notes that the dual of disjunction, NOR(short for NOT OR), can also define all the connectives. Sheffertranslates ‘p NORq’ as‘neitherp norq’. From a logical pointof view, negation is dispensable. This raises hope that all of theparadoxes of negation can be translated away.

Bertrand Russell quickly incorporated NAND intoPrincipiaMathematica. Sheffer’s functions have also been a great economyto the assembly line symbol manipulation of computers (as witnessed bythe popularity of NAND gates and NOR gates). However, human beingshave trouble achieving fluency with Sheffer’s connectives. EvenSheffer translates them negatively. Psychologically, the phrases‘either notp or notq’ and‘neitherp norq’ are each heard as adouble dose of negation rather than as an alternative to negation.

But we could let computers do our metaphysics just as we let them doour taxes. The only serious objection is that the problems ofnegation do not really go away when we translate into artificiallanguages. For instance, the challenge posed by negative existentialsentences such as ‘Pegasus does not exist’ persists whentranslated as ‘Pegasus exists NAND Pegasus exists’. Anydesire to make ‘Pegasus does not exist’ come out truewarrants a desire to make ‘Pegasus exists NAND Pegasusexists’ come out true. (Since classical logic does not permitempty names, the NAND existential sentence will not be true.)

The more general concern is that the problems which are naturallycouched in terms of negation persist when they are translated into adifferent logical vocabulary. Given that the translation preservesthe meaning of the philosophical riddle, it will also preserve itsdifficulty.

We engage in negative thinking to avoid highly complicated positivethinking. What is the probability of getting at least one head in tentosses of a coin? Instead of directly computing the probability ofthis highly disjunctive positive event, we switch to a negativeperspective. We first calculate the probability of a total absence ofheads and then exploit the complement rule: Probability (at least onehead) = 1 − Probability (no heads). An apt anagram of NEGATIVISMis TIMESAVING.

Some possible worlds are easier to contemplate negatively. Thalessaid that all is water. Suppose he was nearly right except for theexistence of two bubbles. These two absences of water become theinteresting players (just as two drops of water in an otherwise emptyspace become interesting players in the dual of this universe). Howwould these bubbles relate to each other? Would the bubbles repel each other?Would the bubbles be mutually unaffected? Deep thinking about gravity yieldsthe conclusion that the bubbles would attract each other! (Epstein1983, 138–9)

The hazard of drawing metaphysical conclusions from psychologicalpreferences is made especially vivid by caricatures. We know thatcaricatures are exaggerated representations. Despite the flagrantdistortion (and actually because of it) we more easily recognizepeople from caricatures rather than from faithful portraits.

For navigational purposes, we prefer schematic subway maps over onesthat do justice to the lengths and curves of the track lines. But thisis not a basis for inferring that reality is correspondingly schematic.

Our predilection for positive thinking could reflect an objectivefeature of our world (instead of being a mere anthropocentricprojection of one style of thought). But if this objectivepositiveness is itself contingent, then it does not explain why thereis something rather than nothing. For Bergson’s explanation tosucceed, the positive nature of reality needs to be a metaphysicallynecessary feature.

7. The subtraction argument

Thomas Baldwin (1996) reinforces the possibility of anempty world by refining the following thought experiment: Imagine a worldin which there are only finitely many objects. Suppose each objectvanishes in sequence. Eventually you run down to three objects, twoobjects, one object and thenPoof! There’s your emptyworld.

What can be done temporally can be done modally. There is only a smalldifference between a possible world with a hundred objects and apossible world with just ninety-nine, and from there …. well,just do the arithmetic!

Can the subtraction be completed if there necessarily are infinitelymany things? Penelope Maddy (1990) claims that unit sets are concreteentities, sharing the location of their members. The existence of oneconcrete entity would guarantee the existence of infinitelymany. Consequently, there would be no finite worlds.

Baldwin avoids this issue with a different definition. Concreteentities are violators of Leibniz’s principle of the identity ofindiscernibles. Concrete things may have exact duplicates. Forinstance, Cameron Winklevoss could have a twin who PERFECTLY resembleshim (unlike his homozygotic twin Tyler Winklevoss). In contrast, theunit set comprised of Cameron Winklevoss cannot have a perfecttwin. All sets obey Leibniz’s principle of the identity ofindiscernibles and so Baldwin counts them as abstract entities.

Geraldine Coggins (2010, chapter 4) objects that Baldwin’s definitionof concreteness is inferior to the customary spatiotemporal definition. Shedeems the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties astoo problematic to ground the distinction between concrete andabstract objects.

Another concern is that infinite proliferation can beprecipitated by the constitution relation. Assume that each part of aconcrete entity is itself concrete. Also assume that concrete entitiesare infinitely divisible (as seems natural given that space isdense). An infinitely complex object cannot be nibbled away with anynumber of finite bites.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (2013) suggests that we instead take big,infinite bites. Instead of subtracting entity by entity, subtract bythe chunk (of infinitely composite entities).

Our metaphysical calculations are subliminally influenced by how we picturepossible worlds (Coggins 2010, chapter 3). If possible worlds are envisaged ascontainers, then they can be completely emptied. Similarly, ifpossible worlds are pictured as stories (say maximally consistent waysthings could have been), then our library will contain a tale lackingany concrete entities as characters. But if possible worlds arepictured mereologically, as giant conglomerates of concrete objects(Lewis 1986), our subtraction falters before we reach zero. Similarly,if possible worlds require an active construction (say, LudwigWittgenstein’s imaginary rearrangements of objects drawn from theactual world), then the very process of construction ensures thatthere are some concrete objects in every possible world.

Some kind of background theory of possible worlds is needed. Forwithout this substantive guidance, the subtraction argument seemsinvalid. More specifically, from a metaphysically neutral perspective,the fact that it is possible for each object to not exist seemscompatible with it being necessary that at least one objectexists.

The founder of modal logic, Aristotle, has special reason to deny that‘Necessarily (p orq)’ entails‘Necessarilyp or necessarilyq’. Aristotle believed that all abstract entitiesdepend on concrete entities for their existence. Yet he also believedthat there are necessary truths. The existence of any particularindividual is contingent but it is necessary that some individualsexist.

Science textbooks teem with contingent abstract entities: theequator, Jupiter’s center of gravity, NASA’s space budget, etc.Twentieth century mathematics makes sets central. Sets are defined interms of their members. Therefore, any set that contains a contingententity is itself a contingent entity. Any set that contains Cameron Winklevoss is anabstract entity that has no weight or color or electric charge. But itstill depends on Winklevoss for its existence.

Mathematics can be reconstructed in terms of sets given the assumptionthat something exists. From Cameron Winklevoss, set theorists canderive the set containing him, then the set containing that set, thenthe set containing that larger set, and so on. Through arachnophiliccraftiness, all of mathematics can be reconstructed from sets. Butfounding all of mathematics on Cameron Winklevoss would fail toreflect the necessary status of mathematical truth. Foundingmathematics on a necessary being such as God would alienateatheists. So ecumenical set theorists instead spin this amazingstructure from only the set that does not depend on the existence ofanything: the empty set. This is the closest mathematicians get tocreation from nothing!

This does not avoid all controversy. Early set theorists and an arraycontemporary metaphysicians reject the empty set. Yet the lovelinessof the construction makes many of their colleagues receptive to WesleySalmon’s ontological argument: “The fool saith in his heart thatthere is no empty set. But if that were so, then the set of all suchsets would be empty, and henceit would be the emptyset.”

E. J. Lowe (2013, 192) argues on behalf of the fool: Two sets areidentical exactly if they have the same members. So the identity of aset is grounded on the identity conditions of its members. In theabsence of members, the set is ill-defined. Mathematicians may wieldit as a useful fiction. But utility should not be confused withtruth. Since mathematical statements such as ‘The first primenumber after 1,000,000 is 1,000,003’ are necessary truths andcan only be rendered true by the existence of a contingent being, suchas Cameron Winklevoss, Lowe concludes that there necessarily existsat least one contingent being. Consequently, the empty world isimpossible even if there are no necessary beings.

There are other metaphysical systems that make the existence of someconcrete entities necessary without implying that there are anynecessarily existing concrete things. In hisTractatus phase,Ludwig Wittgenstein takes a world to be a totality of facts. A factconsists of one or more objects related to each other in a certainway. By an act of selective attention, we concentrate on just theobjects or just the relations. But objects and relations are alwaysinextricably bound up with each other. Since every fact requires atleast one object, a world without objects would be a world withoutfacts. But a factless world is a contradiction in terms. Therefore,the empty world is impossible.

Nevertheless, the persuasiveness of the subtraction argument is notentirely hostage to background theories about the nature of possibleworlds. Even those with metaphysical systems that guarantee theexistence of some concrete entities feel pressure to revise thosesystems to accommodate the empty world, or at least to look for someloophole that would make their system compatible with Baldwin’sthought experiment.

Consider the combinatorialist David Armstrong. He eventually acquiescedto the empty world by relaxing his account of truthmakers. Atruthmaker is a piece of reality that makes a statement true.Armstrong believes that every contingent truth is made true by atruthmaker and has wielded the principle forcefully against analyticalbehaviorists, phenomenalists, nominalists, and presentists. Sincethere can be no truthmaker for an empty world, Armstrong appears tohave a second objection to the empty world (supplementing theobjection based on his combinatorial conception of a possibleworld). Yet Armstrong (2004, 91) instead claims that the empty worldcould borrow truthmakers from the actual world. His idea is that thetruthmakers for possibilities are actual objects and that these actualobjects could serve as the truthmakers for the empty world. DavidEfird and Tom Stoneham (2009) object that cross-world truthmakerswould be equally handy to the analytical behaviorists, phenomenalistsand their ilk. Whether or not Armstrong has contradicted himself, hehas illustrated the persuasiveness of the subtraction argument.

8. Ontological neutrality

Aristotle assumes that universal generalizations have existentialimport; ‘All gods are immortal’ implies that there aregods. Contemporary logicians agree that universal quantifiers haveexistential import: pantheism, ‘All is god’, entailstheism, ‘There is a god’ . However, contemporary logiciansdiffer from Aristotle in analyzing universal generalizations asconditionals. They think ‘All gods are immortal’ has theform ‘For each thing, if it is a god, then it isimmortal’. So if there are no gods, the conditional is vacuouslytrue. This explains why the atheist can consistently argue: All godsare immortal. Immortality is impossible. Therefore, there are nogods.

Contemporary logicians are also impressed by the intuitive equivalencebetween ‘All men are mortal’ and its contrapositive‘All immortals are non-men’. This equivalence ispredicted by the hypothesis that universal generalizations areconditionals.

Tolerance of vacuously true generalizations does not stop contemporary classical logic from precluding an empty world.Since its universal quantifier has existential import, each ofits logical laws imply that something exists. For instance, theprinciple of identity,Everything is identical to itself entailsThere existssomething that is identical to itself. All sorts of attractiveinferences are jeopardized by the empty world.

Logicians do not treat their intolerance of the empty world as aresource for metaphysicians. They do not want to get involved inmetaphysical disputes. They feel that logic should be neutral withrespect to the existence of anything. They yearn to rectify this“defect in logical purity” (Russell 1919, 203).

The ideal of ontological neutrality has led some philosophers toreject classical logic. A direct response would be to challenge theexistential import of the classical quantifiers.

Proponents of “free logic” prefer to challenge theexistential presupposition of singular terms (Lambert 2003, 124). Inclassical logic, names must have bearers. Free logic lacks thisrestriction and so countenances empty names as in ‘SherlockHolmes is a detective’ and negative existentials such as‘Pegasus does not exist’. Proponents of free logicsuggest that these departures are a necessary condition for nottrivially implying an existential proposition. Jan Heylen (2017)agrees but contends that free logic trivially implies otherexistential sentences. He concludes that any deductive answer to thequestion will beg the question. The background logic will alwaysintrude.

In any case, the changes recommended by free logicians would certainlyundermine W. V. Quine’s (1953a) popular criterion for ontologicalcommitment. Quine says that we can read off our ontology from theexistentially quantified statements constituting our well-acceptedtheories. For instance, if evolutionary theory says that there aresome species that evolved from other species, and if we have no way toparaphrase away this claim, then biologists are committed to theexistence of species. Since philosophers cannot improve on thecredentials of a scientific commitment, metaphysicians would also beobliged to accept species.

So how does Quine defend his criterion of ontological commitmentfrom the menace looming from the empty domain? By compromise. Normallyone thinks of a logical theorem as a proposition that holds in alldomains. Quine (1953b, 162) suggests that we weaken the requirement tothat of holding in all non-empty domains. In the rare circumstances inwhich the empty universe must be considered, there is an easy way oftesting which theorems will apply: count all the universalquantifications as true, and all the existential quantifications asfalse, and then compute for the remaining theorems.

Is Quine beingad hoc? Maybe. But exceptions are common fornotions in the same family as the empty domain. For instance,instructors halt their students’ natural pattern of thinking aboutdivision to forestall the disaster that accrues from permittingdivision by zero. If numbers were words, zero would be an irregularverb.

9. The problem of multiple nothings

Many of the principles used to rule out total emptiness also precludesmall pockets of emptiness. Leibniz says that the actual world musthave something rather than nothing because the actual world must be thebest of all possible worlds, and something is better than nothing. Butby the same reasoning, Leibniz concludes there are no vacuums in theactual world: more is better than less.

Leibniz also targets the possibilityof there being more than one void. If there could be more than onevoid, then there could be two voids of exactly the same shape and size.These two voids would be perfect twins; everything true of one voidwould be true of the other. This is precluded by the principle of theidentity of indiscernibles: if everything true ofx is true ofy, thenx is identical toy.

A second problem with multiple voids arises from efforts toparaphrase them away. From the time of Melissus, there have beenarguments against the possibility of a void existing in the manner thatan object exists: “Nor is there any void, for void is nothing, andnothing cannot be.” (Guthrie 1965, 104) If you say there is a vacuum inthe flask, then you are affirming the existence of something in theflask—the vacuum. But since ‘vacuum’ means anabsence of something, you are also denying that there is something inthe flask. Therefore, ‘There is a vacuum in the flask’ is acontradiction.

Some react to Melissus’s argument by analyzing vacuums as propertiesof things rather than things in their own right. According to C. J. F.Williams (1984, 383), ‘There is a vacuum in the flask’should be rendered as ‘The flask noths’. He does this inthe same spirit that he renders ‘There is fog inWinchester’ as ‘Winchester is foggy’ and‘There is a smell in the basement’ as ‘The basementsmells’.

If this paraphrase strategy works for vacuums, it ought to work forthe more prosaic case of holes. Can a materialist believe that thereare holes in his Swiss cheese? The holes are where the matter is not. So toadmit the existence of holes is to admit the existence of immaterialobjects!

One response is to paraphrase ‘There is a hole in thecheese’ as ‘The cheese holes’ or, to be a bit easieron the ear, as ‘The cheese is perforated’. What appeared tobe a wild existential claim has been domesticated into a comment on the shape of thecheese.

But how are we to distinguish between the cheese having two holes asopposed to one? (Lewis and Lewis 1983, 4) Well, some cheese is singlyperforated, some cheese is doubly-perforated, yet other cheese isn-perforated wheren equals the number of holes inthe cheese.

Whoa! We must be careful not to define‘n-perforation’ in terms of holes; that wouldre-introduce the holes we set out to avoid.

Can holes be evaded by confining ourselves to theprocess of perforation? Single-hole punchers differ from triple-hole punchers by how they act; singlelyrather than triply.

The difficulty with this process-oriented proposal that the product, ahole, is needed to distinguish between successful and merely attemptedperforation. Furthermore, the paraphrase is incomplete because it doesnot extend to holes that arise from processes such as looping. If the universepopped into existence five minutes ago, then most holes formed withoutany process.

Can we just leave expressions of the form‘n-perforated’ as primitive, unanalyzed shapepredicates? David and Stephanie Lewis (1983) note that this strands us with an infinitelist of primitive terms. Such a list could never have beenmemorized. The Lewises do not see how‘n-perforated’ can be recursively defined withoutalluding to holes.

The paraphrase prospects seem equally bleak for being‘n-vacuumed’. Big meteorites pass through theatmosphere in about one second leaving a hole in theatmosphere—a vacuum in “thin air”. The air cannotrush in quickly enough to fill the gap. This explains why rock vaporfrom the impact shoots back up into the atmosphere and later rainsdown widely on the surface. During a meteorite shower, the atmosphereis multiply vacuumed. But this is just to say that there are manyvacuums in the atmosphere.

10. Is thereany nothingness?

The trouble sustaining multiple voids may push us to the mostextreme answer to ‘Why is there something rather thannothing?’, namely, ‘There must not only be something butthere must not be any emptiness at all!’.

Parmenides maintained that it is self-defeating to say thatsomething does not exist. The linguistic rendering of this insight isthe problem of negative existentials: ‘Atlantis does notexist’ is about Atlantis. A statement can be about something onlyif that something exists. No relation without relata! Therefore,‘Atlantis does not exist’ cannot be true. Parmenides andhis disciples elaborated conceptual difficulties with negation into anincredible metaphysical monolith.

The Parmenideans were opposed by the atomists. The atomists saidthat the world is constituted by simple, indivisible things moving inempty space. They self-consciously endorsed the void to explainempirical phenomena such as movement, compression, and absorption.

Parmenides’s disciple, Zeno of Elea, had already amassed an amazingbattery of arguments to show motion is impossible. Since these implythat compression and absorption are also impossible, Zeno rejects thedata of the atomists just as physicists reject the data of parapsychologists.

Less radical opponents of vacuums, such as Aristotle, re-explainedthe data within a framework of plenism: although the universe is full,objects can move because other objects get out of the way. Compressionand absorption can be accommodated by having things pushed out of the waywhen other things jostle their way in.

In theTimaeus, Aristotle’s teacher Plato attempted tocombine atomism with plenism as a “likely story”. Theatoms are the Platonic solids (regular, convex polyhedra), each havinga distinctive role in the composition of objects. Like an irreverentlyintelligent school boy, Aristotle objects that the Platonic solidscannot fill space. Every arrangement of Platonic solids yields thesort of gaps that one can more readily predict in a universe composedsolely of spherical atoms.

Aristotle agrees that atoms could fill space if they were allcubes. Pressing his luck, Aristotle goes on to claim that tetrahedracan also complete space. It is testament to Aristotle’s subsequentauthority that this claim was accepted for seventeen hundred years—despite being easily refutable by anyone trying to snuglycombine tetrahedral blocks. Almost any choice of shapes guaranteesinterstitial vacua. This geometrical pressure for tiny vacua creates aprecedent for the cosmic void (which surrounds the material cosmos)and the intermediate empty spaces that provide a promising explanationof how motion is possible.

Yet Aristotle denied the void can explain how things move. Movementrequires a mover that is pushing or pulling the object. An object in avacuum is not in contact with anything else. If the object did move,there would be nothing to impede its motion. Therefore, any motion in avacuum would be at an unlimited speed. This conflicts with the principle thatno object can be in two separate places at the same time.

Aristotle’s refutation of the void persuaded most commentators forthe next 1500 years. There were two limited dissenters to his thesisthat vacuums are impossible. The Stoics agreed that terrestrial vacuumsare impossible but believed there must be a void surrounding thecosmos. Hero of Alexandria agreed that there are no naturally occurringvacuums but believed that they can be formed artificially. He citespumps and siphons as evidence that voids can be created. Hero believedthat bodies have a natural horror of vacuums and struggle to preventtheir formation. You can feel the antipathy by tryingto open a bellows that has had its air hole plugged. Try as you might,you cannot separate the sides. However, unlike Aristotle, Hero thoughtthat if you and the bellows were tremendously strong, you couldseparate the sides andcreate a vacuum.

Hero’s views became more discussed after the Church’santi-Aristotelian condemnation of 1277 which required Christianscholars to allow for the possibility of a vacuum. The immediatemotive was to preserve God’s omnipotence. God could have chosen tocreate the world in a different spot. He could have made it bigger orsmaller. God could have also chosen to make the universe a differentshape. This possibilities entail the possibility of a vacuum.

A second motivation is a literal reading of Genesis 1:1. This openingpassage of the Bible describes God as creating the world fromnothing. Such a construction seems logically impossible. Commitment toan illogical miracle jeopardized the Christian’s overarchingcommitment to avoid outright irrationality. If creation out ofnothing were indeed a demonstrable impossibility, then faith would beforced to override an answer given by reason rather than merely answera question about which reason is silent.

All Greek philosophy had presupposed creation was from something moreprimitive, not nothing. Consistently, the Greeks assumed destructionwas disassembly into more basic units. (If destruction intonothingness were possible, the process could be reversed to getcreation from nothing.) The Christians were on their own when tryingto make sense of creation from nothing. (Ancient Chinese philosophersare sometimes translated as parallel believers in creation fromnothing. JeeLoo Liu (2014) cautions that both the Daoist andConfucians are speaking about formlessness rather thannothingness.)

Creation out of nothing presupposes the possibility of totalnothingness. This in turn implies that there can be somenothingness. Thus Christians had a motive to first establish thepossibility of a little nothingness. Their strategy was to start smalland scale up.

Accordingly, scholars writing in the aftermath of the condemnation of 1277proposed various recipes for creating vacuums (Schmitt 1967). One scheme was tofreeze a sphere filled with water. After the water contracted intoice, a vacuum would form at the top.

Aristotelians replied that the sphere would bend at its weakest point. When the vacuists stipulated that the sphere was perfect, the rejoinderwas that this would simply prevent the water from turning into ice.

Neither side appears to have tried out the recipe. If either had, thenthey would have discovered that freezing water expands rather thancontracts.

To contemporary thinkers, this dearth of empirical testing is bizarre.The puzzle is intensified by the fact that the medievals did empiricallytest many hypotheses, especially in optics.

Hero was eventually refuted by experiments conducted by EvangelistaTorricelli and Blaise Pascal. In effect, they created a barometerconsisting of a tube partially submerged, upside down, in bowl ofmercury. What keeps the mercury suspended in the tube? Is there anunnatural vacuum that causes the surrounding glass to pull the liquidup? Or is there no vacuum at all but rather some rarefied andinvisible matter in the “empty space”? Pascal answeredthat there really was nothing holding up the mercury. The mercuryrises and falls due to variations in the weight of the atmosphere. Themercury is beingpushed up the tube, not pulled up byanything.

When Pascal offered this explanation, Descartes wrote ChristianHuygens (8 December 1647) that the hasty young man had the vacuum toomuch on his mind. (A more amusing translation of the letter hasDescartes complaining that Pascal had too much vacuum in his head;alas, Descartes’ writing loses something in the original.) Descartesidentified bodies with extension and so had no room for vacuums. Ifthere were nothing between two objects, then they would be touchingeach other. And if they are touching each other, there is no gapbetween them.

Well maybe the apparent gap is merely a thinly occupied region ofspace. On this distributional model, there is no intermediate “emptyobject” that separates the two objects. There is merely unevenly spreadmatter. This model is very good at eliminating vacuums in the sense ofempty objects. However, it is also rather good at eliminating ordinaryobjects. What we call objects would just be relatively thick depositsof matter. There would be only one natural object: the whole universe.This may have been the point of Spinoza’s attack on vacuums (Bennett1980). (Indian philosophers associate nothingness with lack of differentiation.They may prefer to describe Spinoza’s world as a realm of nothingness dominatedby a single overarching unity.)

Descartes was part of a tradition that denied action at a distance. Thisorthodoxy includedGalileo. He was distressed by Johannes Kepler’s hypothesis that the mooninfluences the tides because the hypothesis seems to require causalchains in empty space. How could the great Kepler believe something sosilly? After Isaac Newton resurrected Kepler’s hypothesis he eventually capitulatedto orthodoxy and stuffed the space between the moon and the Earth withether.

Indeed, the universality of Newton’s law of gravitation seems torequire that the whole universe be filled with a subtle substance.How else could the universe be bound together by causal chains?Hunger for ether intensified as the wave-like features of light becameestablished. It is tautologous that a wave must have a medium.

Or is it? As the theoretical roles of the ether proliferated,physicists began to doubt there could be anything that accomplishedsuch diverse feats. These doubts about the existence of ether wereintensified by the emergence of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Hepresented his theory as a relational account of space; if there were noobjects, there would be no space. Space is merely a useful abstraction.

Even those physicists who wished to retain substantival space brokewith the atomist tradition of assigning virtually no properties to thevoid. They re-assign much of ether’s responsibilities to space itself.Instead of having gravitational forces being propagated through theether, they suggest that space is bent by mass. To explain how spacecan be finite and yet unbounded, they characterize space as spherical.When Edwin Hubble discovered that heavenly bodies are traveling awayfrom each other (like ants resting on an expanding balloon),cosmologists were quick to suggest that space may be expanding.“Expanding into what?” wondered bewildered laymen,“How can space bend?”, “How can space have ashape?”, ….

Historians of science wonder whether the ether that was loudly pushedout the front door of physics is quietly returning through the backdoor under the guise of “space”. Quantum field theoryprovides especially fertile ground for such speculation. Particles arecreated with the help of energy present in “vacuums”. Tosay that vacuums have energy and energy is convertible into mass, isto deny that vacuums are empty. Many physicists revel in the discoverythat vacuums are far from empty.

Frank Wilczek (1980), Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (2010, 180)as well as Lawrence Krauss (2012) explicitly claim that this answersthe question of why there is something rather than nothing. The basicidea goes back to an issue raised by the symmetry of matter andanti-matter. Given that the symmetry implies equality, matter andanti-matter should have annihiliated each other. Creation should havebeen aborted. Why is there NOW something (particles) rather thannothing (mere energy in a quantum field)? This question was answeredby calculations suggesting that there was about a billionth morematter than anti-matter. Although it is still possible for theuniverse to be without particles, the slight numeric imbalance biasesthe universe toward states in which there are many particles. A smallrandom change can trigger a phase transition analogous to thetransformation of very cold liquid beer into solid beer when the cap of the bottleis popped (suddenly reducing the pressure in the bottle).

A proud physicist is naturally tempted to announce these insightsthrough the bullhorn of metaphysics. But philosophers interested inthe logic of questions will draw attention to the role of emphasis inframing requests for explanations. ‘Why didEve eatthe apple?’, ‘Why did Eveeat the apple?’,and ‘Why did Eve eat theapple?’ are differentquestions because they specify different contrast classes (vanFraassen 1980, 127–130). Philosophers read ‘Why is theresomething rather than nothing?’ tenselessly as in‘Why is π an irrational number?’. The philosophers alsoread ‘something’ as a quantifier ranging over any concreteentity. The quantum vacuum is a concrete entity (in the sensedescribed in sections 4 and 7) and so is in the philosopher’s domainof discourse. But for rhetorical effect, physicists anachronisticallyback-date their domain of discourse to the things of nineteenthcentury physics. Thus the physicists wind up addressing‘Whyis there something rather thannothing?’.

Philosophers complain of misleading advertising. They asked onequestion and the proud physicists answered a different question.Lawrence Krauss defends the switch as an improvement. Often scientistsmake progress by altering the meaning of key terms. Why stick with anintractable (and arguably meaningless) question? We should wrigglefree from the dead hand of the past and rejuvenate our curiosity withthe vocabulary of contemporary cosmology.

The physicist turned philosopher, Rudolf Carnap (1950), recalls howthermodynamicistsexplicated “heat” into the moreprecise concepts of temperature, thermal energy, and heattransfer. Although the new terms are not synonymous with the old, theybear enough similarity to disarm the objection that the physicists aremerely changing the topic. Our questions, like our children, canmature without losing their identity over time. (The idea of therebeing two different questions being asked is pursued in Carroll 2012,Other Internet Resources.)

David Albert is open to the possibility of old questions beingimproved by new interests and discoveries. However, he denies thatLawrence Krauss’s particular change of meaning constitutes animprovement (2012, Other Internet Resources):

Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states—no lessthan giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems—are particulararrangements of elementary physical stuff. The truerelativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not beingany physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement ofthe fields—what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on thecontrary) is the simpleabsence of the fields! The fact thatsome arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence ofparticles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the factthat some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen tocorrespond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the factthat particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as thosefields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than thefact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as myfingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings—ifyou look at them aright—amount to anything even remotely inthe neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

11. Phenomenological aspects of nothingness

After a mystical experience in 1654, Blaise Pascal’s interest innothingness passed from its significance to science to thesignificance of nothingness to the human condition. Pascal thinkshuman beings have a unique perspective on theirfinitude. HisPensées is a roller coaster ride surveying thehuman lot. Pascal elevates us to the level of angels by exalting inour grasp of the infinite, and then runs us down below the beasts forwittingly choosing evil over goodness. From this valley of depravityPascal takes us up again by marveling at how human beings tower overthe microscopic kingdom, only to plunge us down toward insignificanceby having us dwell on the vastness of space, and the immensity ofeternity.

He who regards himself in this light will be afraid ofhimself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him bynature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, willtremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as hiscuriosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed tocontemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with theInfinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothingand everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending theextremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hiddenfrom him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeingthe Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he isswallowed up. (Pensées sect. II, 72)

Pascal’s association of nothingness with insignificance andmeaninglessness was amplified by the Romantics. Their poetryde-emphasized salvation, seeking to immerse the reader in a rawapprehension of nature, unmediated by reason. Kant further obscuredGod by casting Him into the noumenal abyss, available only throughpractical faith rather than theoretical reason.

As among the first forthright atheists, Arthur Schopenhauer faced thefull force of ‘Why is there something rather thannothing?’. According to Schopenhauer, religion and rationalismaim to reassure us that the universe has a design. Our astonishmentthat there is anything betrays awareness that it is all a meaninglessaccident.

Readers of Schopenhauer were presented with the awesome contingency asan actuality rather than a terrible possibility. The experiencecaptured the attention of William James (who had experimented withnitrous oxide to understand the oceanic philosophy of Georg Hegel and,in 1882, published the phenomenological investigationinMind). James provides a simple recipe for eliciting theemotion:

One need only shut oneself in a closet and begin to think of the factof one’s being there, of one’s queer bodily shape in the darkness… of one’s fantastic character and all, to have the wonder stealover the detail as much as over the general fact of being, and to seethat it is only familiarity that blunts it. Not onlythatanything should be, but thatthis very thingshould be, is mysterious! (1911, 39)

Another close reader of Schopenhauer, Ludwig Wittgenstein,characterizes the phenomenology as exhausting the thrust of the riddleof existence. Instead of expressing a well-formed question, ‘Whyis there something rather than nothing?’ is an expression of themystical wonder

6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—as a limited whole.Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.

6.5 When an answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question—the riddle does not exist. (From Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

This emotional characterization persists into Wittgenstein’s laterphilosophy. In Lectures on Ethics, Wittgenstein uses the language ofseeing-as. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’is a prompt to see the world as a miracle. This gestalt switch is nota mistake. Nor is it an insight. Even the logical positivists werewilling to grant the question has emotive meaning (just not cognitivemeaning).

The characteristic phenomenology of the question has also beensuggested as a resource in explaining why we fail to recognize theradical ambiguity of the question. Andrew Brenner (2016, 1319)conjectures that the multiplicity of interpretations is masked by theemotional unity.

Thinkers in the tradition of Phenomenology retained Schopenhauer’sconviction that the emotion harbors a metaphysical insight. Instead oftossing the question into the emotivist waste basket, like the logicalpositivists, or lapsing into quietism, like Wittgenstein,existentialists provide detailed treatments of the awe expressed bythe ultimate question. They built on Schopenhauer’s literary approachto philosophy, depicting the emotion in plays and novels such asSartre’sNausea.

InThe Concept ofDread, Søren Kierkegaard (1844) claims that nothingness wells upinto our awareness through moods and emotions. Emotions areintentional states; they are directed toward something. If angered, Iam angryat something. If amused, there is something I findamusing. Free floating anxiety is often cited as a counterexample. ButKierkegaard says that in this case the emotion is directed atnothingness.

According to Heidegger, we have several motives to shy away from thesignificance of our emotional encounters with nothingness. They arepremonitions of the nothingness of death. They echo the groundlessnessof human existence.

Some have hoped that our recognition of our rootlessness wouldrescue meaning from the chaos of nothing. But Heidegger deniesus such solace.

Heidegger does think freedom is rooted in nothingness. He also sayswe derive our concept of logical negation from this experience ofnothing. This suggests a privileged perspective for human beings.We differ from animals with respect to nothing.

12. Animal Cognition of Absences

Since Heidegger thinks that animals do not experience nothingness, heis committed to skepticism about animal reasoning involvingnegation. Consider the Stoic example of a dog that is following atrail. The dog reaches a fork in the road, sniffs at one road andthen, without a further sniff, proceeds down the only remainingroad. The Stoics took this as evidence that the dog has performed adisjunctive syllogism: “Either my quarry went down this road orthat road. Sniff—he didnot go down this road.Therefore, he went down that road.” Heidegger must discount thisas anthropomorphism.

Many biologists and psychologists side with the Stoic’s emphasis onour continuity with animals. They deny that human beings have amonopoly on nothingness. A classic anomaly for the stimulus-responsebehaviorist was the laboratory rat that responds to the absence of astimulus:

One rather puzzling class of situations which elicit fear are thosewhich consist of alack of stimulation. Some members of thisclass may be special instances of novelty. An anesthetised chimpanzeecould be described as a normal chimpanzee with the added novelty of‘no movement’; solitude could be the novelty of ‘nocompanions’. This is not simply quibbling with words; for thereis very good evidence (see Chapter 13) that the failure of a stimulusto occur at a point in time or space where it usually occurs acts likeany other kind of novel stimulus. However, the intensity of the fearevoked by the sight of a dead or mutilated body is so much greaterthan that evoked by more ordinary forms of novelty that we perhapsought to seek an alternative explanation of the effects of thisstimulus. Fear of the dark is also difficult to account for in termsof novelty, since by the time this fear matures darkness is no lessfamiliar than the light. (Gray 1987, 22)

These anomalies for behaviorism fill rationalists with mixedemotions. On the one hand, the experiments refute the empiricistprinciple that everything is learned from experience. On the otherhand, the experiments also constitute a caution againstover-intellectualizing absences. A correct explanation of emotionalengagement with absences must be more general and cognitively lessdemanding than rationalists tend to presuppose. Even mosquito larvaesee shadows. Doubts about whether they have consciousness do not makeus doubt that they see shadows. So the perception of absences cannotdepend on consciousness or any other advanced mental state. Perhapsthe earliest form of vision was of these absences of light. So insteadof being a pinnacle of intellectual sophistication, cognition ofabsences may be primal.

Existentialists tend to endorse the high standards assumed byrationalists. Their disagreement with the rationalists is over whetherthe standards are met. The existentialists are impressed by thecontrast between our expectations of how reality ought to behave andhow it in fact performs.

This sense of absurdity makes existentialists more accepting ofparadoxes. Whereas rationalists nervously view paradoxes as achallenge to the authority of reason, existentialists greet them asopportunities to correct unrealistic hopes. Existentialists are fondof ironies and do not withdraw reflexively from the pain ofcontradiction. They introspect upon the inconsistency in the hope ofachieving a resolution that does justice to the three dimensionalityof deep philosophical problems. For instance, Heidegger is sensitiveto the hazards of saying that nothing exists. Like an electrician whomust twist and bend a wire to make it travel through an intricatehole, the metaphysician must twist and bend a sentence to probe deeplyinto the nature of being.

Rudolf Carnap thinks Heidegger’s contorted sentences malfunction. Toillustrate, Carnap quotes snippets from Heidegger’sWhat isMetaphysics?:

What is to be investigated is being only and—nothing else; beingalone and further—nothing; solely being, and beyondbeing-nothing. What about this Nothing? … Does the Nothingexist only because the Not, i.e. the Negation, exists? Or is it theother way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because theNothing exists? … We assert: the Nothing is prior to the Notand the Negation…. Where do we seek the Nothing? How do we findthe Nothing…. We know the Nothing…. Anxiety reveals theNothing…. That for which and because of which we were anxious,was ‘really’—nothing. Indeed: the Nothing itself—assuch—was present…. What about this Nothing?—TheNothing itself nothings. (Heidegger as quoted by Carnap 1932,69)

This paragraph, especially the last sentence, became notorious as aspecimen of metaphysical nonsense.

The confusion caused by Heidegger’s linguistic contortions isexacerbated by separating them from their original text and herdingthem into a crowded pen. There is a difference between a failureto understand and an understanding of failure. The real test forwhether Heidegger’s sentences are meaningless is to see what can bemade of them in action, applied to the questions they were designed toanswer.

Carnap also needs to consider the possibility that Heidegger’ssentences are illuminating nonsense. After all, Carnap was patientwith the cryptic Wittgenstein. In theTractatus, Wittgensteinspeaks like an oracle. He even characterized his carefully enumeratedsentences as rungs in a ladder that must be cast away after we havemade the ascent and achieved an ineffable insight. And Wittgensteinmeant it, quitting philosophy to serve as a lowly schoolmaster in arural village.

Other critics deny thatWhat is Metaphysics? suffers from anabsence of meaning. Just the reverse: they think Heidegger’s passagesabout nothing involvetoo many meanings. When Heideggerconnects negation with nothingness and death, these logicians are putin mind of an epitaph that toys with the principle of excluded middle:Mrs Nott was Nott Alive and is Nott Dead. According to thesecritics, Heidegger’s writings can only be understood in the way weunderstand the solution to equivocal riddles:

What does a man love more than life?
Hate more than death or mortal strife?
That which contented men desire,
The poor have, the rich require,
The miser spends, the spendthrift saves,
And all men carry to their graves?

(Leeming, 1953, 201)

The answer,Nothing, can only be seen through a kaleidoscopeof equivocations.

Some of the attempts to answer ‘Why is there something ratherthan nothing?’ equivocate or lapse into meaninglessness. Thecomedic effect of such errors is magnified by the fundamentality ofthe question. Error here comes off as pretentious error.

Those who ask the question ‘Why is there something ratherthan nothing?’ commonly get confused. But the questionitself appears to survive tests for beingmerely a verbal confusion.

In any case, the question (or pseudo-question) has helped to hone thediagnostic tools that have been applied to it. As the issue getsshaped and re-shaped by advances in our understanding of‘is’, quantification and explanatory standards, it becomesevident that the value of these diagnostic tools is not exhausted bytheir service in exposing pseudo-questions. For genuine questionsbecome better understood when we can discriminate them from theirspurious look-alikes.

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Other Internet Resources

• Albert, David, 2012, “On the Origin of Everything, review of L. Krauss,A Universe from Nothing, in New York Times, March 23.
• Carroll, Sean, 2012, “A Universe from Nothing?,Cosmic Variance blog post, Discover Magazine, April 28.
• Fielding, Henry,On Nothing, from the University of Oxford Text Archive.
• Holt, Jim,Nothing Ventured from Harper’s Magazine, November 1994.
• Heidegger on Nothingness (from Philosophy Pages byGarth Kemerling, a site which “offers helpful information for studentsof Western philosophical tradition.”)
• John Wilmot’s poem Upon Nothing
• Parmenides

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