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Letters About Nothing • Climate of Change • There Are Others • Freedom & Bondage • Face Values • Modern Omniscience • Bad Thoughts? Full Marx! • Philosophy: What Is It Good For?

Letters About Nothing

Dear Editor: In Issue 136, Sophia Gottfried considers non-existence and nothing. She mentions pure nothingness, and asks whether empty space would contain such a pure nothing, or instead constitute something. In my view, the purest kind of nothing means the same as ‘none of anything’ or ‘not anything’. A good way to define that kind of nothing, would be to say that if ‘nothing’ possesses a particular attribute X, then attribute X is not possessed at all. By this definition, empty space would not be nothing, because if empty space has any attribute(s), then that attribute is possessed by the space.

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