Victoria Wohl at Aeon Magazine:
The history of nothing in Western philosophy is long and varied. Philosophers have distinguished between different kinds of nothing (what is not absolutely, not a specific something, not real, etc): its vagueness is part of the fecundity of the concept. They have treated it as a problem of theology (the heretical idea that everything may come not from God, but from nothing); of ethics (for Jean-Paul Sartre, nothingness is the precondition of human freedom); and of logic, as when Bertrand Russell scandalously conceded the logical existence of negative facts.
Above all, speaking nothing has been a problem of ontology, the systematic discourse (logos in ancient Greek) of beings (onta) and of being (on). Ontology is the study not of this or that particular being but of being in general: not just every material and conceptual entity in the world but the essence (from the Latin esse, ‘to be’) that unites them all and allows us to say of each one that it ‘is’. Ontology asks: what actually exists and how do we know? An investigation of fundamental reality, it also opens onto questions about language and thought and their access to (or obstruction of) that reality – that is, the relation between logos and onta.
more here.
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