Daniel Bonevac (University of Texas): 'Aquinas' Third Way'
Aquinas’s third way of demonstrating God’s existence has received little scholarly respect in the past few decades. The consensus seems to be that it commits logical fallacies and assumes an implausible metaphysical principle of plenitude. But those objections stem from a temporal interpretation of Aquinas’s language which, though reasonable in most contexts, conflicts with his overall pattern of using that language. I take seriously his description of the third way as modal—the way from possibility and necessity—and show that the argument so construed is valid, resting on an actualist conception of ontological dependence and independence.
