The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Nothing at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever? ultimate why question: why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

Contributors

245 Contributors Daniel O. Dahlstrom, chair of the Department of Philosophy at Boston University, is the author of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (2001) and Philosophical Legacies (2008). A former president of the Metaphysical Society of America and currently presiding officer of the Heidegger Circle, he is the editor of Interpreting Heidegger: New Essays (forthcoming, 2011). His recent articles include “Continentia, Self-possession, and Resoluteness: What Is the Good of Being and Time?” Research in Phenomenology (2009); and “The Critique of Pure Reason and Continental Philosophy” in Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer (2010). Lloyd P. Gerson is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has written many books and articles on ancient philosophy, including Ancient Epistemology (2009); Aristotle and Other Platonists (2005); Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato (2004); Plotinus (1994); and God and Greek Philosophy (1990). He is the editor of The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity (2010) and The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (1996); and editor and translator of, with John Dillon, Neoplatonic Philosophy (2004), with Brad Inwood, Hellenistic Philosophy (2nd edition 1997), and with H. G. Apostle, Aristotle. Selected Works (1992). Edward C. Halper is professor of philosophy at the University of Georgia . He is the author of One and Many in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: Books Alpha–Delta (2009) and One and Many in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: The Central Books (1989, reprint 2005). The final book in the series, One and Many in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: Books I–N, is scheduled to appear in 2012. Halper is also the author of Form and Reason: Essays in Metaphysics (1993), along with some fifty papers in journals and books, including many on Hegel and Plato and others on Maimonides, Spinoza, and Nietzsche. Recent articles include “Aristotle’s Paradigmatism: Book Iota and the Difference It Makes,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient 246  Contributors Philosophy (2007); “Hegel’s Criticism of Newton” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth Century Philosophy (2008); and “Torah as Political Philosophy: Maimonides and Spinoza on Divine Law,” in Judaic Sources and Western Thought: Jerusalem’s Enduring Presence (forthcoming , 2011). Brian Martine is professor of philosophy and director of the Humanities Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is the author of Individuals and Individuality (1984); Indeterminacy and Intelligibility (1992); and the first two parts of a trilogy in systematic philosophy (tentatively titled “Where Are the Philosophers Now?”), which are currently under review for publication. He has also published various shorter essays developing the themes of these central works. He serves as the chief administrative officer of the Metaphysical Society of America and on the Council of Administrative Officers of the American Council of Learned Societies. Jon McGinnis is associate professor of classical and medieval philosophy at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His general research interest is in the history and philosophy of Aristotelian natural philosophy, with a particular focus on that tradition within the Arabic-speaking world. McGinnis has written numerous articles on various aspects of ancient and medieval science and philosophy. He is also the author of a general introduction to the philosophy of Avicenna in Oxford University Press’s Great Medieval Series (2010); translator and editor of Avicenna’s Physics (2009) from his encyclopedic work The Healing; and co-translator, with David C. Reisman, of Classical Arabic Philosophy: An Anthology of Sources (2007). McGinnis has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend , two NEH Fellowships, and a Mellon grant, and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Robert Cummings Neville is professor of philosophy, religion, and theology and dean emeritus of the School of Theology at Boston University . He is the author of twenty-two books in those fields, ranging from God the Creator (1968) to Realism in Religion (2009). Nicholas Rescher is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has also served as chair of Contributors  247 the Philosophy Department and as director (and currently chair) of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades, he has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style with over one hundred books to his credit, ranging over all areas of philosophy, sixteen of them translated from English into eight other languages. Rescher has served as a president of the American Philosophical Association, the American...