The John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Peter van Inwagen has written primarily on metaphysics, Peter van Inwagen the philosophy of logic, philosophical theology, and Christian apologetic. He has focused on such ultimate questions as the nature of the world, the reasons for its existence, and our place and purpose within it. Educated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Rochester, where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1969, he began his teaching career at Syracuse University. He was named a professor of philosophy there in 1980 and remained on the faculty until 1995, when he accepted his present position at Notre Dame. Dr. van Inwagen has been a visiting professor at the University of Rochester, the University of Arizona, and Rutgers University. In addition to numerous invited lectures given in the United States, Canada, Peru, the United Kingdom, Europe, and China, he has delivered four major series of lectures—the F.D. Maurice Lectures at King’s College, London, in 1999, the Wilde Lectures at Oxford University in 2000, the Stewart Lectures at Princeton University in 2002, and the Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews University in 2003. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the editorial boards of eight professional journals. Dr. van Inwagen has published some 125 articles in professional journals and edited five volumes of collected essays, including (with Dean Zimmerman) the forthcoming Persons: Human and Divine, which will be published by Oxford University Press. He is also the author of eight books. His first major work, An Essay on Free Will (1983), revolutionized the free will debate with his claim that human free will, a pre-condition of moral responsibility, is incompatible with determinism and his defense of it against various scientific and metaphysical objections. In Material Beings (1990), he developed and defended a theory of material objects according to which only living beings and fundamental particles exist. Following his now classic Metaphysics (1993, 2002) and a collection of essays in philosophical theology, God, Knowledge, and Mystery (1995), he published The Possibility of Resurrection and Other Essays in Christian Apologetics (1997). Ontology, Identity, and Modality (2001) is another collection of his essays in metaphysics, and in his most recent book, The Problem of Evil, which will be published in June by Oxford Evil University Press, he contends that the vast amount of suffering in the world cannot be used to demonstrate that there is no God. A new work in preparation, Being: A Study in Ontology, will be published by the Clarendon Press.