William F. Vallicella
William F. Vallicella is an American philosopher. Biography. Vallicella has a Ph.D. (Boston College; 1978), taught for a number of years at University of Dayton (where he was a tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy; 1978–91) and Case Western Reserve University (Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy; 1989–91), and retired to Gold Canyon, Arizona from where he now contributes to philosophy mainly online. He is the author of many published articles, primarily on the subjects of metaphysics and philosophy of religion. In the short chapter on him in the book "Falling in love with wisdom: American philosophers talk about  their calling", Vallicella discusses the philosophical questions which he happened to think about in his youth, such as "What if God hadn't created anything?", "What if even God didn't exist", and "Why is good, good, and evil, evil?", and his thoughts on the inquiry of philosophy. Publications. Books. What is it for any contingent thing to exist? Why does any contingent thing exist? For some time now, the preferred style in addressing such questions has been deflationary when it has not been eliminativist. In its critical half, this book thoroughly analyzes and demolishes the main deflationary and eliminativist  accounts of existence, including those of Brentano, Frege, Russell, and Quine, thereby restoring existence to its rightful place as one of the deep topics in philosophy, if not the deepest. In its constructive half, the book defends the thesis that the two questions admit of a unified answer, and that this answer takes the form of what the author calls a paradigm theory of existence. The central idea of the paradigm theory is that existence itself is a paradigmatically existent concrete individual. In this way the author vindicates onto-theology and puts paid to the Heideggerian conceit that Being can not itself be a being. This work will be of interest to all serious students and teachers of philosophy, especially those interested in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. Articles. He has published over 40 scholarly articles, including: