Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga[a] (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology (particularly on issues involving epistemic justification), and logic.
Alvin Plantinga
- God and Other Minds (1967)
- Warranted Christian Belief (2000)
- Rescher Prize (2012)
- Templeton Prize (2017)
From 1963 to 1982, Plantinga taught at Calvin University before accepting an appointment as the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.[2] He later returned to Calvin University to become the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy.[3]
A prominent Christian philosopher, Plantinga served as president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1983 to 1986. He has delivered the Gifford Lectures twice and was described by Time magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God".[4] In 2014, Plantinga was the 30th most-cited contemporary author in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[5] A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2017.[6]
Some of Plantinga's most influential works include God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), and a trilogy of books on epistemology, culminating in Warranted Christian Belief (2000) that was simplified in Knowledge and Christian Belief (2015).[7]
Biography[edit]
Family[edit]
Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Cornelius A. Plantinga (1908–1994) and Lettie G. Bossenbroek (1908–2007), immigrants from the province of Friesland in the Netherlands.[8] After Cornelius earned a PhD in philosophy from Duke University, he secured a teaching job in Michigan in 1941.[9] Cornelius also had a master's degree in psychology. He taught several academic subjects at different institutions throughout his career.[10]
Plantinga married Kathleen De Boer in 1955.[11] They had four children.[12][13] One of Plantinga's brothers, Cornelius "Neal" Plantinga Jr., is a theologian and the former president of Calvin Theological Seminary and another, Leon, is an emeritus professor of musicology at Yale University.[10][14]
Education[edit]
As an adolescent, Alvin Plantinga's family moved from Michigan to North Dakota for his father's job at Jamestown College. At his father's advice, Alvin skipped his last year of high school to enroll at Jamestown College in 1949 at 16.[15][16] That year, his father accepted a teaching job at Calvin University which began in January 1950. Alvin Plantinga moved to Grand Rapids with his family and attended Calvin University for a semester. He applied to Harvard and was awarded a scholarship.[17]
In the fall of 1950, Plantinga transferred to Harvard, where he spent two semesters. In 1951, during Harvard's spring recess, Plantinga attended a few philosophy classes at Calvin University and was so impressed with Calvin philosophy professor William Harry Jellema that he returned in 1951 to study philosophy under him.[18] In 1954, Plantinga began his graduate studies at the University of Michigan where he studied under William Alston, William Frankena, and Richard Cartwright, among others.[19] A year later, in 1955, he transferred to Yale University where he received his PhD in 1958.[20]
Teaching career[edit]
Plantinga began his career as an instructor in the philosophy department at Yale in 1957, and then in 1958, he became a professor of philosophy at Wayne State University during its heyday as a major center for analytic philosophy. In 1963, he accepted a teaching job at Calvin University, where he replaced the retiring Jellema.[21] He then spent the next 19 years at Calvin before moving to the University of Notre Dame in 1982. He retired from the University of Notre Dame in 2010 and returned to Calvin University, where he holds the first William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy. He has trained metaphysics and epistemology-focused philosophers including Michael Bergmann, Michael Rea, and Trenton Merricks.
Awards and honors[edit]
Plantinga served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division, from 1981 to 1982.[22] and as president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1983 to 1986.[16][23]
He has honorary degrees from Glasgow University (1982), Calvin University (1986), North Park College (1994), the Free University of Amsterdam (1995), Brigham Young University (1996), and Valparaiso University (1999).[23] He was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971–72, and elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975.[23]
In 2006, the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion renamed its Distinguished Scholar Fellowship as the Alvin Plantinga Fellowship.[24] The fellowship includes an annual lecture by the current Plantinga Fellow.[25]
In 2012, the University of Pittsburgh's Philosophy Department, History and Philosophy of Science Department, and the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science co-awarded Plantinga the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy,[26] which he received with a talk titled, "Religion and Science: Where the Conflict Really Lies".
In 2017, Baylor University's Center for Christian Philosophy inaugurated the Alvin Plantinga Award for Excellence in Christian Philosophy. Awardees deliver a lecture at Baylor University and their name is put on a plaque with Plantinga's image in the Institute for Studies in Religion. He was named the first fellow of the center as well.[27]
He was awarded the 2017 Templeton Prize.