How many hands do you have? Two? Or do you havethree? Your left hand, your right hand, and the non-existent third handthat's attached to your head? Obviously, that last "hand" shouldn'tcount. To say that you don't have a third hand isn't to say that youhave a hand that possesses the particularly stunting property ofnon-existence. We get ourselves into a real muddle if we take claims ofnon-existence to mean that there is some object that has the propertyof non-existence; for then that object must both exist (to have anyproperties) and not exist, and that can't be. So when we say that noone came to the party, we mean to deny that someone came to the party — not to affirm that at least one person did, namely "no one", the"non-person", the person with the rather anti-social property of non-existence. This confusion becomes unavoidable if one assumesthat every noun in a language must refer to something. For if youassume that, then when you come upon a sentence like "Nothing beats aroyal flush" you'll...

Whenever anyone would raise this question, my much missed teacher, thelate Sidney Morgenbesser, used to say: "And if there were nothing,you're the kind of person who would ask 'Why isn't there something?'!" You might also consider looking at Robert Nozick's discussion of thisquestion in his book Philosophical Explanations .