The Seba library treats Zero in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including McGilchrist, Iain, Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, James, William).
God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness … the tao is ‘the deep source of everything. It is nothing, and yet in everything’
McGilchrist argues, drawing on Eckhart, Boehme, Kabbalah, and the Tao Te Ching, that zero/nothingness is not privation but the paradoxical ontological ground that is simultaneously empty and absolutely full.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness … the tao is ‘the deep source of everything. It is nothing, and yet in everything’
Duplicate witness to McGilchrist’s core claim that the negation of negation — zero as double negation — yields supreme ontological plenitude rather than mere absence.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
‘They are nothings’, he wrote … ‘das Nichts selbst nichtet’ … Nothing, like Being, is no thing. Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action
McGilchrist invokes Heidegger’s ‘nothing noths’ to establish that zero/nothing is not passive absence but an active ontological force, aligning mathematical emptiness with existential generativity.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
‘They are nothings’, he wrote … ‘das Nichts selbst nichtet’ … Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action, Heidegger implies
Parallel edition witness confirming McGilchrist’s reading of Heidegger: nothingness actively ‘noths,’ making zero a productive rather than merely null quantity.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
an old edition of the spiritual cow-herding pictures, which end with an empty circle corresponding to the eighth of the present series
Suzuki identifies the empty circle (enso) at the culmination of the ox-herding sequence as the visual symbol of zero-as-completion — the void that marks full awakening.
, Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series), 1949supporting
‘As long as one is conscious of having nothing, there still remains the guardian of poverty … For from the very beginning I do not see even the one that is poor.’
Suzuki presents a Zen teacher’s verse in which true emptiness — absolute zero — transcends even the consciousness of having nothing, pointing to a nothingness that annihilates the witness of nothingness itself.
, Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series), 1949supporting
The discrepancy between A and V,,, the surprisingness of the UCS, is equal to zero, so AV, = 0 by Equation 5-2.
James employs zero in its strict mathematical sense as the point of null discrepancy in conditioning equations, where no further learning occurs — zero as the asymptote of habituation.
, The Principles of Psychology, 1890supporting
it must necessarily be said that the being and perfection of every created thing is essentially good. Hence it cannot be that evil signifies a being … by the name of evil is signified the absence of good.
Jung quotes Aquinas on the privatio boni doctrine, where evil is defined as a zero-quantity — pure absence of good — a formulation Jung elsewhere contests as psychologically inadequate.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951aside