Chapter 11, The Ethical Requiredness of There Being Something, Interlude, A Hegelian in Paris Summary and Analysis

John Leslie, a famous cosmologist and English philosopher, has proposed a solution to the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing, something he called "extreme axiarchism" which holds that reality is ruled by abstract value. On Leslie's view, Plato thought that the nature of the good, a form, requires that ethical universes exist over nonethical universes like the Null World. Thus the universe exists because it is good for the universe to exist.

Holt thinks this idea is absurd, given how mediocre the world is. But Leslie's conception of reality is much larger. Existence, on his view, is essentially mental. In fact, it consists of infinite minds that know all that is worth knowing, including...