Nothingness

Are debates on non-existence mere nonsense? This suspicion seems completely implausible once we consider the history of philosophical theories about nothingness. Debates on non-being run like a thread through the entire tradition and across all disciplines of philosophy. From its beginnings with the Presocratics, and extending through all of ancient philosophy, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Classical German philosophy, the 19th-century debate on nihilism, the debate initiated by Meinong regarding the mode of being of non-existent objects, the phenomenological accounts of Heidegger and Sartre, linguistic philosophy and contemporary metaphysics and cosmology, nothingness poses a constant challenge. This collection of essays provides an intellectual biography of nothingness.