Being, Nothing & God

Eight steps to the deepest question: why is there anything at all, and is there a being that had to be?

A course on the thought of Metaphysics.

Course outline

  1. Why Is There Anything At All? — The deepest question, posed. Leibniz first asked 'why is there something rather than nothing?'; Heidegger makes it the fundamental question of metaphysics and adds a deeper one — not just why beings…
  2. What Does 'Exists' Mean? — The analytic answer to Heidegger's grandeur: get precise about 'exists.' Quine: a theory is committed to whatever its bound variables must range over — 'to be is to be the value of a variable' — and…
  3. Is Nothing Something? — Emptiness — A third path between 'being' and 'nothing.' Nagarjuna: nothing has svabhava (intrinsic, independent existence); all things arise dependently and are empty (sunyata). This is neither the eternalist's…
  4. That Than Which Nothing Greater — The strangest argument in philosophy: that God's existence follows from the mere concept of God. Anselm: God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived; a God existing only in the…
  5. The Reason for the World — The cosmological road to necessary being. Both Leibniz and Spinoza apply the principle of sufficient reason to the existence of the world — but Leibniz concludes to a necessary being TRANSCENDING the…
  6. God in Modal Dress — The ontological argument reborn in the apparatus of Course 3. Plantinga: define maximal greatness as being maximally excellent in every possible world; IF such greatness is possible (exemplified in…
  7. Being Is Not a Being — Heidegger's closing turn: every God-argument in this course — ontological, cosmological, modal — answers the question 'which being is the highest/ necessary one?' But that was never the question of…

Part of the Symposium course library.