All about nothing: cross-disciplinary academic discussions of nihil in the seventeenth century

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay examines and attempts to contextualise historically a group of Latin texts in the 1619 publication Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-seriae on the topic of nihil (nothing). Reviewing previous interpretations of these texts as being facetious, the essay argues that the Disputatio de Nihilo within this section is actually a serious academic debate. Furthermore, it is shown to be the first of a series of similarly cross-disciplinary works on the topic of nothing, a series which stretches into the eighteenth century. The essay establishes that there are two unrelated strands of discourse about nihil in evidence in the collection - one humanistic and rhetorical and originating from a poem by Jean Passerat, the other genuinely philosophical and deriving from scholastic, particularly logical, interests in the word “nothing.” The essay traces the latter strand throughout the seventeenth century and beyond, and offers some explanations for this curiosity of intellectual history.