How about some analogies…
You have a sock drawer, but it is currently empty. Does it contain any black sock? No – you don’t have any socks at all so you certainly don’t have a black one. Clearly any([]) must return false – if it returned true this would be counter-intuitive.
The case for all([]) is slightly more difficult. See the Wikipedia article on vacuous truth. Another analogy: If there are no people in a room then everyone in that room can speak French.
Mathematically all([]) can be written:
where the set A is empty.
There is considerable debate about whether vacuous statements should be considered true or not, but from a logical viewpoint it makes the most sense:
The main argument that all vacuously true statements are true is as follows: As explained in the article on logical conditionals, the axioms of propositional logic entail that if P is false, then P => Q is true. That is, if we accept those axioms, we must accept that vacuously true statements are indeed true.
Also from the article:
There seems to be no direct reason to pick true; it’s just that things blow up in our face if we don’t.
Defining a “vacuously true” statement to return false in Python would violate the principle of least astonishment.