Metaphysics

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If Van Inwagen had a positive example, he’d have no need of the argument; and yet he knows of no way of deducing a contradiction. Every perfection is a simple positive 17 property, where “positive” simply means “not negative” (a negative property is eg. “being not round”). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, [20] and was President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2008/09. He was the President of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 2010 to 2013. [5] Vihvelin, Kadri (September 18, 2017). "Arguments for Incompatibilism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University . Retrieved April 13, 2020. Van Inwagen also added what he called the Mind Argument (after the philosophical journal Mind, where such arguments often appeared). "The Mind argument proceeds by identifying indeterminism with chance and by arguing that an act that occurs by chance, if an event that occurs by chance can be called an act, cannot be under the control of its alleged agent and hence cannot have been performed freely. Proponents of [this argument] conclude, therefore, that free will is not only compatible with determinism but entails determinism." [10]

Ayer (A.J.) - Language, Truth and Logic" (“written with the enthusiasm of a recent convert” to logical positivism), Reflections on the Essays of Draper, Gale, and Russell", The Evidential Argument from Evil (Howard-Snyder, ed.): 219-243. Simple positive properties cannot conflict as this only arises where one is “X” and the other “not X”, or one a complex that includes the negative of a property in or included in the other. Footnote 19: Van Inwagen doesn’t quote which paper, but I assume it’s " Findlay (J.N.) - Can God's Existence Be Disproved?".So, simple positive properties cannot conflict. But we need these properties to be had essentially. So, we need:-

Three Persons in One Being: On Attempts to Show that the Doctrine of the Trinity is Self-Contradictory", The Holy Trinity (Stewart, ed.): 83-89. A2: God necessarily exists, but everything else is contingent, made by his free choice, and is sustained in existence by him. In this third edition, a chapter on ontology 3 has been added at the end of the book, as a "Coda." This chapter discusses the concepts of being and existence, and applies the conclusions reached in this discussion to two ontological problems:

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A3: Human beings were created by God with the function to love and serve him forever, though they have free choice whether they fulfil it. Human history reflects this failure of function. This Fifth Edition differs from the Fourth in that the long, previously difficult chapter on time has been extensively rewritten, making it much more accessible and engaging for the student reader. In addition, the author has enhanced clarity throughout the text with improvements to word choice, sentence structure, and paragraph lucidity. Finally, the Notes and Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of each chapter and the General Bibliography have all been brought up to date. Footnote 2: The passage Van Inwagen quotes isn’t " Kant (Immanuel) - The Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God"; maybe it’s Van Inwagen’s exegesis.

Chalmers, David J., David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman, eds. 2009. Metametaphysics: New essays on the foundations of ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Draper, P. (1997/2008). 'Evolution and the Problem of Evil'. In L. Pojman and M. Rea (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. Wadsworth Press.

Encyclopedia Entries.

So, there is a necessarily-existent individual thing in every possible world, including the actual world.

Metaphysics differs from non-philosophical subjects in that there are no established facts to be learned, though in a footnote PvI points out that there are – he claims metaphysical facts that can be known. But they are not “established” in the sense of scientific facts. PvI thinks that his argument for the existence of ultimate reality is sound, but still thinks it is not intellectually perverse to resist it in the way it is to join the Flat Earth Society.Footnote 7: So, this is a different sort of book to " Hasker (William) - Metaphysics: Constructing a World View", which is intended to prop up a Christian worldview. Van Inwagen describes world-diagrams. A world-diagram is “correct in” a given possible world if all its assertions are true in that world – including its assertions about other possible worlds. He then uses world diagrams, rather laboriously, to prove that the Modal 14 Ontological Argument is valid.