Sitting at the Kantian Table of Nothingness

This article appeals to the table of nothingness (Nichts) occurring within Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to assess three recent accounts of nothingness – by Graham Priest, Filippo Costantini, and Filippo Casati & Naoya Fujikawa – 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 and Fujikawa’s accounts seem to do), or dropping the idea of the nihil absolutum, as Costantini’s account does.