Vallicella has a Ph.D. (Boston College; 1978), taught for a number of years at University of Dayton (where he was a tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy; 1978–91) and Case Western Reserve University (Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy; 1989–91), and retired to Gold Canyon, Arizona from where he now contributes to philosophy mainly online.
[1][2][3][4] He is the author of many published articles, primarily on the subjects of metaphysics and philosophy of religion.
[5][6] In the short chapter on him in the book Falling in Love with Wisdom: American Philosophers Talk About Their Calling, Vallicella discusses the philosophical questions which he happened to think about in his youth, such as "What if God hadn't created anything?
For some time now, the preferred style in addressing such questions has been deflationary when it has not been eliminativist.
In its critical half, this book thoroughly analyzes and demolishes the main deflationary and eliminativist accounts of existence, including those of Brentano, Frege, Russell, and Quine, thereby restoring existence to its rightful place as one of the deep topics in philosophy, if not the deepest.