究極の問い再考

抄録

Being a highly traditional question of metaphysics, the so-called “Ultimate Why-Question” still interests some contemporary philosophers. To ask this question amounts to asking where, if anywhere, “why-chains” can stop.
Whereas the most traditional approach to the Ultimate Why-Question has been to try to answer it by “God”, i. e., “Necessary Existence/Being”; the most usual ap-proach in contemporary analytical philosophy has been to dismiss it as a nonsense pseudo-problem because it is “logically unanswerable”. I call the former tradition as a whole the “old tradition” and the latter the “new tradition”.
In this article, I propose a “third alternative”, by suggesting that the Ultimate Why-Question is not necessarily unanswerable but can be answered by a kind of “Necessary Existence/Being”, which cannot be anything in particular at all (in-cluding even “God”) but only the “Absolute Totality of Reality”.
The following three procedures would be required to make the above sugges-tions assertions:
(1) to show whether the “Absolute Totality of Reality” exists at all,
(2) to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be the “Nec-essary Existence/Being” that would stop all possible why-chains,
(3) to decide whether only the “Absolute Totality of Reality” satisfies the above conditions.