Abstract

Like air pollution and rock music, the idea of nothing may seem to be an affliction peculiar to modern man. Nothingness has often been identified with existentialism, an identification that has blurred its prior history in Western philospohy. But like the idea of almost everything else, the idea of nothing originated with the Greeks, and in this dissertation I explore four different concepts of nothing that were developed in ancient Greek philosophy. ;In Chapter One I demonstrate that nothing has been a notoriously multivocal idea that has performed a variety of ontological functions in both ancient and modern philosophy. To come to grips with its multiple meanings and bizarre ontological status, I reinterpret Paul Tillich's distinction between oukontic and meontic nothing. I argue that oukontic nothing is the contradictory opposite of being which cannot exist, whereas meontic nothing is a noncontradictory opposite of being which somehow exists. With reference to Aristotle's theory of opposition, I distinguish three types of meontic nothing based on three different modes of opposition--correlation, contrariety, and privation. ;In Chapter Two I examine Parmenides' conception of Nothing as the contradictory opposite of being and the distressing conclusions he drew from this conception. For Parmenides, nothing cannot exist, and being therefore is without change, motion, and qualitative differentiation. In Parmenides' view, all of these things presuppose the existence of nothing. ;To restore to being some or all of the characteristics that Parmenides had denies, some of his successors transformed the oukontic nothing of the Way of Truth into one of three forms of meontic nothing. In Chapter Three I explore the atomists' idea of nothing as void and Aristotle's important criticisms of this concept. In Chapter Four I examine two different types of meontic nothing posited by Plato, the nothing of Difference and the nothing of the Receptacle and its content . In Chapter Five I trace the development of the idea of nothing as privation in Aristotle's analysis of generation and corruption and in Plotinus' analysis of matter and evil. In Chapter Six I illustrate some of the ways in which these various ideas of nothing anticipated subsequent interpretations of nothing, and in two appendices I examine in detail the subsequent history of the first type of meontic nothing, the atomists' void