The philosophical question of nothingness has often been controversial. The main core of the question is the use of ‘nothing’ or ‘nothingness’ as a noun phrase rather than a quantifier phrase. This work deals with the question of nothingness and metaphysical nihilism in analytic philosophy. After evaluating an account of nothingness based on the notion of an empty possible world, the present work proposes two original arguments for metaphysical nihilism. With a preface by Graham Priest. “Simionato’s book delivers a welcome deepening of our understanding of nothing.” Graham Priest

Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and the call for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecrafts work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrageWalpole called her a hyena in petticoatsyet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.

Timothy Sprigge was one of the leading exponents of philosophical idealism in the last fifty years. The idealist worldview, long unfashionable, has been coming back into favour, and Sprigge's work has found a new readership. These selected essays focus on the view of consciousness on which his unique system of metaphysics and ethics is based.

In 1790 came that "extraordinary outburst of passionate intelligence," Mary Wollstonecraft's reply to Edmund Burke's attack on the principles of the French Revolution entitled a "Vindication of the Rights of Men." In this pamphlet she held up to scorn Burke's defence of monarch and nobility, his merciless sentimentality. "It is one of the most dashing political polemics in the language," Mr. Taylor writes enthusiastically, "and has not had the attention it deserves. . . . For sheer virility and grip of her verbal instruments it is probably the finest of her works. Some of her sentences have the quality of a sword-edge, and they flash with the rapidity of a practised duellist. It was written at a white heat of indignation; yet it is altogether typical of the writer that, in the midst of the work, quite suddenly, she had one of her fits of callousness and morbid temper, and declared she would not go on. With great skill Johnson persuaded her to take it up again; and with equal suddenness her eagerness returned, and the book was finished and published before any one else could answer Burke."

Jewish mysticism approaches God as no-thing or nothing, reflecting Judaism’s traditional identification of God as incorporeal. Whereas technical philosophical language often employed to discuss Jewish mysticism has a tendency to ward off otherwise interested readers, this study sufficiently breaks down the technical language of Jewish mysticism in its various expressions to allow a beginner to benefit from what may otherwise be indescribable and only approached by consideration of what is not rather than what is. Integral to the title, From Something to Nothing, is the concept that God cannot be something, because that would be restricting, so God is simply no-thing. Ironically, the conventional religious expression for the biblical notion of creation is “something from nothing”, whereas the title of this volume is its precise opposite, which may at first seem to be illogical – creation in reverse. However, in a volume dedicated to various deliberations on magic and mysticism, the ultimate reality may receive expression as nothingness, that is, no-thingness, no quality associated with things. What adds to our difficulty today is that nothingness is inextricably linked with silence. Is silence also an element or indication of an ultimate reality or its absence? Or is it merely the reflection of nothing whatsoever? This is at the heart of modern debates between atheists and believers. Believers feel that even this silence speaks to this ultimate reality, whereas atheists claim that if you cannot show it, then you do not know it. In other words, believers are victims of their own wishful thinking. From Something to Nothing memorializes Canadian mystic and scholar Zalman Schachter Shalomi, z”l, engaging in particular aspects that he addressed at some phase of his colourful and erudite life, providing the reader with a broad spectrum of both phenomenological and intellectual topics.