That anything should exist at all does seem to me a matter for the deepest awe.
Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist.
The most important question of all is also one of the most neglected. The list below includes what are, to the best of my knowledge, the only scholarly writings in the contemporary literature that directly address the question of why the universe exists. (That question includes two sub-questions, ‘Why is there anything at all?’ and ‘Why does this particular world exist, rather than some other’, which we may call the “general” and the “special” ultimate questions of existence, respectively.) Note that this excludes non-scholarly writings (such as Jim Holt’s Why does the world exist?); writings that address the question indirectly (such as those found in certain areas within physical cosmology and the philosophy of religion); and writings too removed from the present (published before, say, 1850, such as Leibniz’s De rerum originatione radicali). My personal recommendations are boldfaced.
If you think I’m missing something, please let me know.
- Armour, Leslie, Values, God, and the problem about why there is anything at all, The journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 1, no. 2 (1987), pp. 147-162.
- Blackburn, Simon, Philosophy, London: Quercus, 2009, pp. 132-141.
- Brooks, David, Why this world?, Philosophical papers, vol. 21, no. 3 (1992), pp. 259-273.
- Burke, M. B., Hume and Edwards on “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, Australasian journal of philosophy, vol. 62, no. 4 (December, 1984), pp. 355-362.
- Carlson, Erik & Erik Olsson, The presumption of nothingness, Ratio, vol. 14, no. 3 (September, 2001), pp. 203-221.
- Carroll, Sean, Why is there something, rather than nothing?, ArXiv, February 6, 2018.
- Conee, Earl & Ted Sider, Riddles of existence : a guided tour of metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, ch. 5.
- Davies, Brian, Why is there anything at all?, Think, vol. 2, no. 4 (Summer, 2003), pp. 7-15.
- Edwards, Paul, Why?, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The encyclopedia of philosophy, New York: Macmillan, 1967, vol. 8, pp. 296-302.
- Fleming, Noel, Why is there something rather than nothing, Analysis, vol. 48, no. 1 (January, 1988), pp. 32-35.
- Goldschmidt, Tyron (ed.), The puzzle of existence : why is there something rather than nothing?, London: Routledge, 2013.
- Goldstick, Daniel, Why is there something rather than nothing, Philosophy and phenomenological research, vol. 40, no. 2 (December, 1979), pp. 265-271.
- Grover, Stephen, Cosmological fecundity, Inquiry, vol. 41, no. 3 (1998), pp. 277-299.
- Grünbaum, Adolf, Creation in cosmology, in N. S. Hetherington (ed.), Encyclopedia of cosmology : historical, philosophical, and scientific foundations of modern cosmology, New York: Garland, 1993, pp. 126-136.
- Grünbaum, Adolf, Why is there a world at all, rather than just nothing?, Ontology studies, vol. 9 (2009), pp. 7-19.
- Heller, Michał, Ultimate explanations of the universe, Heidelberg: Springer, 2009.
- Heylen, Jan, Why is there something rather than nothing? A logical investigation, Erkenntnis, vol. 82, no. 3 (June, 2017), pp. 531-559.
- Knight, Thomas S., Why not nothing?, The review of metaphysics, vol. 10, no. 1 (September, 1956), pp. 158-164.
- Kuhn, Robert Lawrence, Why this universe? Toward a taxonomy of possible explanations, Skeptic, vol. 13, no. 2 (2007), pp. 28-39.
- Kuhn, Robert Lawrence, Closer to truth : science, meaning, and the future, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2007, pp. 235-258.
- Kuhn, Robert Lawrence, Why not nothing?, in John Leslie & Robert Lawrence Kuhn (eds.), The mystery of existence : why is there anything at all?, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 246-278.
- Kusch, Martin, On “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, American philosophical quarterly, vol. 27, no. 3 (July, 1990), pp. 253-257.
- James, William, The problem of being, in Some problems of philosophy, New York: Longmans, Green, 1911, pp. 38-46.
- Leslie, John, Efforts to explain all existence, Mind, vol. 87, no. 346 (1978), pp. 181-194.
- Leslie, John, Value and existence, Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979.
- Leslie, John, Review of Bede Rundle’s Why there is something rather than nothing, Mind, vol. 114, no. 453 (January, 2005), pp. 197-200.
- Leslie, John, Why there is something, in Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa & Gary Rosenkrantz (eds.), A companion to metaphysics, 2nd ed., Madden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 625.
- Leslie, John, A cosmos existing through ethical necessity, Philo, vol. 12, no. 2 (Fall, 2009), pp 172-187.
- Leslie, John & Robert Lawrence Kuhn (eds.), The mystery of existence : why is there anything at all?, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
- Lowe, E. J., Why is there anything at all?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 70 (1996), pp. 111-120.
- Maitzen, Stephen, Stop asking why there’s anything, Erkenntnis, vol. 77, no. 1 (2012), pp. 51-63.
- Mann, Robert M., The puzzle of existence, Perspectives on science and Christian faith, vol. 61, no. 3 (September, 2009), pp. 139-150.
- Mawson, Tim, Why is there anything at all?, in Yujin Nagasawa & Erik Wielenberg (eds.), New waves in philosophy of religion, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 36–54.
- Mortensen, Chris, Explaining existence, Canadian journal of philosophy, vol. 16, no. 4 (December, 1986), pp. 713-722.
- Munitz, Milton, The mystery of existence : an essay in philosophical cosmology, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965.
- Nagel, Thomas, Why is there anything?, in Secular philosophy and the religious temperament : essays 2002-2008, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 27-31.
- Ng, Yew-Kwang, Evolved-God creationism : a view of how God evolved in the wider universe, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.
- Nozick, Robert, Why is there something rather than nothing?, in Philosophical explanations, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 115-164.
- Parfit, Derek, Why does the universe exist?, Harvard review of philosophy, vol. 1, no. 1 (1991), pp. 4-5.
- Parfit, Derek, The puzzle of reality: why does the universe exist?, Times literary supplement (1992), pp. 3-5.
- Parfit, Derek, Why anything? Why this?, London review of books, vol. 20, no. 2 (January 22, 1998), pp. 24-27; no. 3 (February 5, 1998), pp. 22-25.
- Post, John, Metaphysics : a contemporary introduction, New York: Paragon House, 1991, ch. 4.
- Rescher, Nicholas, The riddle of existence, Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1984.
- Rescher, Nicholas, Optimalism and axiological metaphysics, The review of metaphysics, vol. 53, no. 4 (June, 2000), pp. 807-835.
- Rundle, Bede, Why there is something rather than nothing, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.
- Sarkar, Husain, Something, nothing, and explanation, Southwest philosophy review, vol. 9, no. 1 (January, 1993), pp. 151-161.
- Schlesinger, George, The enigma of existence, Ratio, vol. 11, no. 1 (April, 1998), pp. 66-77.
- Schuppe, Daniel, Jens Lemanski & Rico Hauswald (eds.), Warum ist überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts? : Wandel und Variationen einer Frage, Hamburg: Meiner, 2013.
- Smith, Quentin, Simplicity and why the universe exists, Philosophy, vol. 279, no. 72 (January, 1997), pp. 125-132.
- Smith, Quentin, The reason the universe exists is that it caused itself to exist, Philosophy, vol. 74, no. 4 (October, 1999), pp. 579-586.
- Unger, Peter, Minimizing arbitrariness: toward a metaphysics of infinitely many isolated concrete worlds, Midwest studies in philosophy, vol. 9, no. 1 (September, 1984), pp. 29-51.
- van Inwagen, Peter, Why is there anything at all?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 70 (1996), pp. 95-110.
- Wippel, John, The ultimate why question : why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2011.
- Witherall, Arthur, The fundamental question, Journal of philosophical research, vol. 26 (2001), pp. 53-87.
- Witherall, Arthur, The problem of existence, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
Dedicated to the memory of Quentin Smith (1952-2020)
