William E. Mann

William E. Mann is an American philosopher of religion, Marsh Professor-at-Large Emeritus at the University of Vermont, where he taught for several decades. Trained at the University of Minnesota, he works within the analytic tradition on classical theism, medieval philosophy, and the conceptual analysis of divine attributes. Mann is best known for his sustained defense of the doctrine of divine simplicity, particularly in essays such as 'Divine Simplicity' (1982) and 'Simplicity and Immutability in God' (1983), where he argues, against critics like Alvin Plantinga and Thomas Morris, that the claim that God's attributes are identical with God can be coherently formulated by treating divine properties as 'rich properties' rather than abstract universals. His work also engages questions of omnipotence, omniscience, divine foreknowledge, and the metaphysics of God's relation to time and morality, drawing extensively on Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. He edited The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion (2005), a widely used survey volume, and God, Modality, and Morality (2015), which collects his major papers. Mann's work is part of a broader Anglo-American revival of philosophical theology associated with figures such as Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzmann, and Robert Adams. Critics have questioned whether his rich-properties analysis preserves the traditional motivation for simplicity, but his contributions remain reference points in debates over divine attributes.