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Metaphysics

‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’

Andrew Brenner tries to make sense of the question.

People have wondered why there is something rather than nothing for a long time. The Rigveda, one of the world’s oldest surviving religious texts, alludes to the question, and suggests that even God might not know the answer. But it was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the eighteenth century who is credited with phrasing the question in the way we ask it in our title (in Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, §7). In the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger called it ‘the fundamental question of metaphysics’. As far as I can tell, he didn’t have much of substance to say about the answer.

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