Volume 7, Issue 1, Spring 2013
Marco Simionato
Pages 55-70
Reconsidering Metaphysical Nihilism
In contemporary analytic philosophy metaphysical nihilism is the thesis according to which there might be nothing, i.e. a possible world with no concrete
objects in it, but that can contain (or must contain) abstract objects. After summarizing the set of premises from which analytic metaphysics deals with nothing, I propose a set of premises that could fit continental metaphysics. Then I propose a new set of premises for the question of nothing that derives from a synthesis of the two above mentioned sets. By means of this new set, I try to show that nothing as a possible world with no objects at all is not a self-contradictory entity and I propose an argument for proving that an empty possible world exists.