A Careful Inspection on Priest’s Recent View about Nothing
Studies in Logic, Vol. 17, No. 6 (2024): 1–17 PII: 16743202(2024)06000117
Wenfang Wang
Abstract. Graham Priest has recently argued, in several of his papers and a book manuscript, for a view about nothing according to which nothing is paradoxical in several respects. The focus of the present paper is on three sub-claims of his view: (1) that nothing is an object, (w) that nothing is not an object, and (3) that everything grounds for its being on its being different from nothing. The author argues, both philosophically and formally, in this paper that Priest’s arguments for the above sub-claims are not persuasive enough. Especially, the author argues that Priest’s formal theory of nothing will suffer from a dilemma: either it will allow that there is a paradise of many nothings and therefore embrace an inflated ontology, or it will identify all nothings to be one and the same thing and therefore make everything ground everything in a certain sense.