Concept

Why is there anything at all?

Overview

"Why is there anything at all?" or "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question about the reason for basic existence which has been raised or commented on by a range of philosophers and physicists, including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger, who called it "the fundamental question of metaphysics".

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Related ideas

• Principle of sufficient reason
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Philosophy
• Western philosophy
• Immanuel Kant
• Max Tegmark
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Contingency (philosophy)
• Cosmology
• Mathematics
• Metaphysics
• Stephen Hawking
• Squaring the circle
• Absolute (philosophy)
• Number
• Physicist
• Parmenides
• Scientific law
• Quantum mechanics
• Aphorism
• Robert Nozick
• Spacetime
• Time
• Infinite regress

Place in the tradition

Part of Philosophy.

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