Alvin Plantinga

John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

(1) Warrant: The Current Debate (2) Warrant and Proper Function (3) Warranted Christian Belief

In his first series of lectures, Plantinga surveys ideas surrounding the concept of ‘warrant’, defining it as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In his second series, he establishes four criteria to judge if a belief has warrant and defends the claim that naturalism in epistemology requires supernaturalism in metaphysics. In his final series, he shows that it is rational to accept Christian belief and proposes ‘the Aquinas/Calvin Model’, arguing that Christian belief is ‘justified, rational, and warranted’.

Biography

Alvin Plantinga was born on 15 November 1932 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Time magazine described him as ‘America’s leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God’. Lecturer in Philosophy at Yale in 1957, Plantinga became Professor of Philosophy at Wayne State University in 1958. In 1963, joined Calvin University, replacing his mentor, William Harry Jellema. Nineteen years later, he was appointed as the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, leaving in 2010 to become the first William Harry Jellema Chair in Christian Philosophy at Calvin.

Invited to give the Suarez Lectures and the Wilde Lectures, Plantinga was a Guggenheim Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Glasgow and the Free University of Amsterdam, among others. Notable works include Faith and Philosophy (1964), The Ontological Argument (1965), God and Other Minds (1967), God, Freedom and Evil (1974), Does God Have a Nature? (1980), Faith and Rationality (1983), The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (1998), and Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality (2003).

Published/Archival Resources

Published as Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, Warranted Christian Belief.