Abstract

This paper considers the kind of illumination that is provided by an analysis of the global logical forms of the structure and relations of worldly facts and events. I argue that such a global logical reflection, as undertaken in representative forms by Wittgenstein and by Nāgārjuna, shows how we can consider the traditional principle of sufficient reason (PSR) as a formally empty principle rather than a metaphysically substantive one. This recognition of the formal emptiness of the PSR does not suggest the nonexistence of the facts and phenomena it is appealed to in explaining, but rather provides for a radical alternative to forms of global appeal to it within the metaphysical tradition (e.g., those made by Spinoza and Parmenides), on which this appeal appears rather to license a conclusion of monism and the inference to a prior, undifferentiated, substantial One, before or behind the world of articulated facts and events itself.