Sitting at the Kantian Table of Nothingness

Abstract

This article appeals to the table of nothingness (Nichts) occurring within Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [1781; 1787] (1998) to assess three recent accounts of nothingness – (Priest 2014), (Costantini 2020), and (Casati & Fujikawa 2019) - under the light of folk preconceptions about nothingness. After defining the two strongest preconceptions as the absence of unrestrictedly everything (nihil absolutum) and the idea of nothingness as a self-contradictory item (nihil negativum), I argue that both might be read as two Aristotelian ‘connected homonyms’, rather than conflating them into a single item (as Priest’s and Casati & Fujikawa’s accounts seem to do), or dropping the idea of the nihil absolutum, as Costantini’s account does

Keywords

• Aristotle’s homonymy. Kant’s table of nothing. Nothingness. absolute nothingness. negative nothingness