What happens when you take the idea of “nothing” seriously—can absences be real, explanatory, and even causally important?
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1. Guest
Roy Sorensen is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a Professorial Fellow at St. Andrews University in Scotland. His work has covered a wide range of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics.
2. Interview Summary
In this interview, Roy Sorensen unpacks why ‘nothingness’ is both irresistible and slippery: we start with ordinary absences, but we can also seem to “subtract” objects away in thought until we reach an ‘empty world’, which makes Martin Heidegger’s question—why there is something rather than nothing—feel pressing, and puzzlingly hard given how simple the empty option looks. He also shows how talk of “nothing” can be more than wordplay, because absences can matter causally: you can be harmed by what isn’t there, and he playfully frames this with a horror-movie-style thought experiment about a “void” as a kind of menace precisely in virtue of what it lacks.
A recurring thread is the contrast between treating “nothing” as a quantifier idea (“there isn’t anything”) versus treating it as a noun that names some weird thing. Sorensen explores how that noun-phrase temptation shows up historically, including a medieval figure who explicitly portrays nothingness as a kind of “substance,” even writing on darkness and shadows for Charlemagne. From there the discussion turns to religious and interpretive questions: he’s skeptical that scripture should function as a straightforward inventory of what exists (illustrated by how translations and background assumptions shift what readers take to be “in” the text). Still, he notes that “creation out of nothing” plays a distinctive role in Christian self-understanding, partly by marking a departure from more familiar “creation-from-stuff” stories. And when the interview touches contemporary “nothingness” enthusiasts like Graham Priest, Sorensen treats dialetheist talk of true contradictions as a strikingly direct way of resisting the idea that the quantifier reading is all we ever mean.
The later parts widen into a broader methodological theme: ‘parsimony’ and what kinds of “costs” metaphysical theories incur. Sorensen discusses David Lewis’s modal realism and the thought that only the types of things matter for simplicity, pushing back by stressing that sheer number can matter too (his “gratuitous extra electron” style intuition). That connects naturally to skeptical hypotheses: if you take seriously the idea that you’re “only five minutes old,” it undercuts your right to rely on complex reasoning at all; and the Ludwig Boltzmann-inspired “Boltzmann brain” worry shows how an extremely minimal explanation of your current experiences can look seductively simple, even if it’s hard to live with. He closes by defending a mainly “negative” picture of philosophy’s value—less about delivering final doctrines, more about diagnosing and clearing away bad views (like medicine eliminating disease)—and he suggests that this critical function is valuable even when positive certainty is elusive.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:35 - Nothingness
03:00 - Holes, absences, and nothingness
06:36 - Noun phrase vs. quantifier phrase
13:12 - Priest and nothingness
16:35 - Nothingness and creation
22:10 - Parsimony for empty space
36:02 - A misleading god?
37:24 - Explaining the data
46:08 - Thermodynamics and the past
48:25 - Simplicity
50:04 - Conservative ontology
54:30 - Ontological bias
57:40 - van Inwagen and why there is something
1:03:30 - Parsimony and possibility
1:07:39 - What is possibility?
1:12:53 - Logical fatalism
1:16:21 - Vagueness and Contradiction
1:23:18 - Epistemicist argument and Huemer
1:31:55 - Example
1:39:42 - Indeterminacy and ignorance
1:40:51 - Supervaluationism
1:46:22 - Terence Horgan
1:53:10 - Newcomb’s problem
1:57:49 - Well-wishing friend
1:59:31 - Infallible predictor
2:03:53 - Irrationality predictably rewarded?
2:10:44 - What is rationality?
2:13:33 - Making yourself a one-boxer
2:19:52 - Commitment and nuclear deterrence
2:24:04 - Originless Sin
2:32:09 - Scenarios not possible?
2:35:39 - Another example
2:36:59 - Priest and rational dilemmas
2:38:45 - Bringing about contradictions
2:42:06 - Also doing good?
2:42:50 - Paraconsistency?
2:43:39 - Another example
2:45:30 - Value of philosophy
2:46:46 - Conclusion
