No~thing Has Nowhere to Stand: A Letter to the Certain

Abstract

Why is there something rather than nothing? This essay argues that the question dissolves. Every traditional answer — God, a primordial vacuum, brute facticity — offers some thing to explain why there are things, and so begs the very question it means to settle. Refusing the regress of causes, the essay asks instead whether nothing was ever possible. Three steps, each secured by a self-undermining (retortive) test, carry the argument: that something is; that to be is to make a difference (a form of the Eleatic Principle); and that to make a difference is to have an edge, a determination. Since nothing, by definition, is the edgeless, nothing cannot be — it is impossible, not merely improbable. A closing movement asks what the necessary, sustaining holding must be, and in what minimal sense it is for what it holds. Written as a letter, for a general philosophical readership.

Cite this paper

@article{shchevyevthing,
  title = {{No~thing Has Nowhere to Stand: A Letter to the Certain}},
  author = {Shchevyev, Nikita},
  journal = {PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)}
}

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