Abstract

Quintessence from Nothingness: Zero, Platonism, and the Renaissance explores the role played by Hindu-Arabic numerals, and especially the zero, in the Renaissance and early modern restructuring of the concepts of number, God, self and thing. ;My first chapters focus on the classical concept of number as plurality, the effect it has on Plato's ontology, and extent to which it survives in the writings of such Renaissance Platonists as John Dee. Although, in a decisive break with the past, Simon Stevin bases his overall understanding of numbers on the functioning of Hindu-Arabic numerals, he also performs the strange operation of assigning to zero nearly all the characteristics held by the one in the concept of number he critiques. Stranger still, similar usurpation of the one's traits by zero occurs even earlier in theology, where the transcendent God's relationship to things moves from being interpreted as the relationship of one to numbers, to being interpreted as the relationship of zero to numbers by the Salem Codex and Charles de Bovelles. Finally, in texts as divergent as Shakespeare's Henry V and the philosophical treatises of the Ukrainian hermeticist Hryhorii Skovoroda, the zero also replaces the one in the concepts of self and thing. ;Analyzing the unanimous insistence of early arithmetics that the zero "signifieth not," I argue that the fundamental change underlying these replacements occurs in the understanding of how signs function. The Platonic model of signs pointing to discrete, real, and ontologically prior entities yields to a model in which, due to its stress on syntax, the signified is held to be posterior to the signifier. The classical number concept, with its accompanying representations of numbers by means of counters and Roman numerals, accords with Plato's understanding of signs. Hindu-Arabic notation, the value of whose signs depends upon their position, offers a key example of the syntactical model, with zero providing the ocular proof that Plato's treatment of signification is wrong