2025.02.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Peter van Inwagen, Being, Oxford University Press, 2023, 320pp., $105.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192883964.
Reviewed by D.T.J. Bailey, University of Colorado at Boulder
Peter van Inwagen has written an excellent monograph on the metaphysics of existence. Anyone seriously interested in the subject can expect to learn much from it and to find much with which to engage. The author (hereafter, PVI) offers both an ontology—answers to the question “What is there?”—and a meta-ontology—answers to the question “How ought one to go about the business of finding out what there is?” Chapters I and V give the meta-ontology, while the interim chapters give the ontological answers about what there is. The book is bittersweet insofar as the meta-ontology is avowedly neo-Quinean, so the author tells us, while the ontology itself teems with entities that Quine would dismiss (and dismisses some he might have tolerated). The book as a whole…
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