The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that C. L. Johnson (PhD student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the tenth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Thursday, February 22, 2024, from 4:15 to 6:15 pm at the CUNY Graduate Center (Room C197). The talk is free and open to all.
Title: On the existence of all possible worlds
Abstract: Why is there something rather than nothing? In “Why Anything? Why This?”, Derek Parfit canvasses several ultimate explanations for existence and their pitfalls, conceding that the possibility for any cogent answer to the question is unlikely. I nevertheless provide such an explanation first by enumerating foundational assumptions common to most, if not all, explanations. From these assumptions, I argue against two popular views regarding the existence of our world: (1) the existence of a necessary being responsible for our world’s creation and (2) the brute existence of our world. Then, by developing an account against the coherence of nothingness, I critique the possibility of Absolute Nothingness, the view that the simplest reality is one devoid of anything. In so doing, I underscore the difference between ontological and explanatory simplicity, showing that though a finite reality (in either the number of worlds or scope) is ontologically simpler than an infinite one (in both number and scope), such a finitude is explanatorily more complex and arbitrary. I then argue that an unbounded Maximality of infinitely many, spatiotemporally disconnected worlds (the opposite of Absolute Nothingness) is the simplest ground (or default state) for our existence, effectively requiring no further explanation.