___________________________________________ In “Why is There Anything at All?” Peter van Inwagen argues that even though it was never necessary that concrete beings existed, it was always maximally probable – just short of necessity – that they did (van Inwagen, 1996). I argue that van Inwagen’s argument fails, albeit for an interesting reason which has remained so far unnoticed in the literatu...

fictional names have been one of the most important and serious topics in the contemporary philosophy of language and metaphysics.several questions such as “do fictional names refer to any objects?” “are fictional characters existent objects?” have resulted in a considerable literature of philosophy. in this essay, we will follow two objectives. first we will describe and elaborate the ideas ...

1 Introduction According to standard, pre-philosophical intuitions, there are many composite objects in the physical universe. There is, for example, my bicycle, which is composed of various parts-wheels, handlebars, molecules, atoms, etc. Recently, a growing body of philosophical literature has concerned itself with questions about the nature of composition. 1 The main question that has been r...

Philosophers have often attempted to use counterfactual conditionals to analyze probability. This article focuses on counterfactual analyzes of epistemic probability by Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen. I argue that a certain type of counterfactual situation creates problems for these analyses. I then argue that Plantinga’s intuition about the role of warrant in epistemic probability is mi...

Editorial Board Members Kent Bach, San Francisco State University Michael Bratman. Stanford University Nancy Cartwright. London School of Economics Richard Feldman. University of Rochester Martin Fischer, University of California, Riverside F. Gler, University of Idaho Ivanhoe, University of Michigan McKinsey, Wayne John Perry. Stanford University James Rachels. University ofAlabama at Birmingh...

The article is primarily concerned with the notion of a truth-maker. An explication for this notion is offered, which relates it to other notions of making something such-andsuch. In particular, it is shown that the notion of a truth-maker is a close relative of a concept employed by van Inwagen in the formulation of his Consequence Argument. This circumstance helps understanding the general me...

Pain and suffering are prima facie bad things. They are widespread. So the traditional argument against theism (the argument from evil) starts with them. Defendants of God’s goodness either have to explain why there is evil (i.e. offer a theodicy) or have at least to show that the argument from evil has no force against theism. Alvin Pantinga (1985) distinguishes between offering a (positive) t...