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Metaphysics. by Peter van Inwagen Review by: Timothy O'Connor The Philosophical Review, Vol. 104, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 314-317

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European Journal for Philosophy of Religion

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Book Review the Problem of Evil, by Peter Van Inwagen

Book Review The Problem of Evil, by Peter van Inwagen Timothy Pritchard King’s College London Disputatio Vol. 4, No. 31 November 2011 DOI: 10.2478/disp-2011-0016 ISSN: 0873-626X © 2011 Pritchard. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License Book Reviews 303 Still, even if this discussion is quick, that is not exactly terrible. The final chapter provides fast food for thought and does so with the same energy that permeates the rest. On the whole, then, NE is great. Easily as great as William Lycan’s introduction to the philoso- phy of language, which is also very great. It is an exciting book that teaches everyone how to do philosophy, and how to do it well. Daan Evers Jesus College OX1 3DW Oxford, UK [email protected] The Problem of Evil, by Peter van Inwagen. Oxford: The Claren- don Press, 2008 (Pbk), Pp. xiv + 183. This is a slightly revised version of van Inwagen’s 2003 Gifford Lec- tures. His focus is on what he calls the ‘apologetic problem’, namely the problem, for a theist, of how we may account for the claim that both God and evil exist together. As with all of van Inwagen’s work, this is a clearly written and richly thought provoking study which repays careful study. One form that an apology may take is that of a ‘theodicy’, this be- ing ‘an attempt to state the real truth of the matter, or a large and significant part of it, about why a just God allows evil to exist ..
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LanCog Lectures in Metaphysics 2013 Dispensing with Ontological Levels: an Illustration1 Peter van Inwagen The University of Notre Dame BIBLID [0873-626X (2014) 38; pp. 25-43] Does metaphysics, or does it not, need ontological levels? Should metaphysics endorse the thesis that things of some kinds are onto- logically more fundamental than things of some other kinds? Must it be a datum of metaphysics that entities of certain kinds are ontologi- cally grounded in entities of certain other kinds? Must it be a feature of any adequate metaphysical theory that it awards a special ontologi- cal status to entities of certain kinds and denies this special status to entities of other kinds? There are two ways to approach these questions (or this ques- tion — for the four questions I have asked are essentially the same question). I’ll call them, tendentiously perhaps, the Bad Way and the Good Way. This is the Bad Way: Begin by giving examples of pairs of things that supposedly oc- cupy different ontological levels (or one of which is ontologically more fundamental than the other or one of which is ontologically grounded in the other or one of which enjoys a special ontological status denied to the other). Proceed to use these examples as in- tuition pumps in the service of an affirmative answer to our ques- tion. Alternatively, play the other side of the game: insist that the default answer to our question is No, and dispute the examples that your opponents say support an affirmative answer — deny the existence of some of the entities that figure in the examples, or deny that there is any reason to suppose that the members of any of the pairs do occupy different ontological levels.
Proxy 'Actualism'

PETER VAN INWAGEN “Who Sees Not that All the Dispute is About a Word?”: Some Thoughts on Bennett’s “Proxy ‘Actualism’” This note is a defense of Alvin plantinga’s “actualist” modal ontology against the criticisms brought against it by karen bennett in her (2006) paper “Proxy ‘actualism’”1 (Familiarlity with both bennett’s paper and chapters IV-VIII of plantinga’s (1974) The Nature of Necessity is assumed.) What I will say in response to bennett’s criticisms of plantinga’s actualism is almost entirely a gloss on the following thesis: It is not essential to plantinga’s philosophy of modality that the word ‘actual’ (or any word formed from ‘actu- al’—‘actually’, ‘actuality’ and so on) occur in its statement. I will defend this thesis in Part I. Having established that thesis (at least to my own satisfaction), I will, in Part II, consider its consequences for bennett’s criticism of plantinga’s actualism. My conclusion will be that these criticisms fail, owing to the fact that they depend on the historical accident that the customary designation for Plant- inga’s position is “actualism”—that if this position had been given a name that did not contain ‘actual’ or any word formed from ‘actual’, the criticisms of the position that are presented in “proxy ‘actualism’” could not even be stated. Fi- nally, in an Appendix, I will discuss a puzzling statement that Bennett has made about the properties Plantinga calls individual essences. I I begin with a précis of plantinga’s modal ontology. This précis will be, I concede, terminologically tendentious in that it will contain no occurrences of the word ‘actu- al’ (or of any word “based on” ‘actual’—‘actually’, ‘actuality’, etc.2).