Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Carl Plantinga (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.

Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Cornelius A. Plantinga (1908–1994) and Lettie G. Bossenbroek (1908–2007).

Plantinga's father was a first-generation immigrant, born in the Netherlands.

His family is from the Dutch province of Friesland; they lived on a relatively low income until he secured a teaching job in Michigan in 1941.

Plantinga's father earned a PhD in philosophy from Duke University and a master's degree in psychology, and taught several academic subjects at different colleges over the years.

Plantinga reluctantly followed his father's advice and in 1949, a few months before his 17th birthday, he enrolled in Jamestown College, in Jamestown, North Dakota.

During that same year, his father accepted a teaching job at Calvin University, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In January 1950, Plantinga moved to Grand Rapids with his family and enrolled in Calvin University.

During his first semester at Calvin, Plantinga was awarded a scholarship to attend Harvard University.

Beginning in the fall of 1950, Plantinga spent two semesters at Harvard.

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.

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.

Plantinga married Kathleen De Boer in 1955.

They have four children.

One of Plantinga's brothers, Cornelius "Neal" Plantinga Jr., is a theologian and the former president of Calvin Theological Seminary.

Another of his brothers, Leon, is an emeritus professor of musicology at Yale University.

A year later, in 1955, he transferred to Yale University where he received his PhD in 1958.

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.

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.

He later returned to Calvin University to become the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy.

In 1963, he accepted a teaching job at Calvin University, where he replaced the retiring Jellema.

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).

He was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971–72, and elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975.

Plantinga served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division, from 1981 to 1982.

He then spent the next 19 years at Calvin before moving to the University of Notre Dame in 1982.

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).

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".

and as president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1983 to 1986.

In 2006, the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion renamed its Distinguished Scholar Fellowship as the Alvin Plantinga Fellowship.

The fellowship includes an annual lecture by the current Plantinga Fellow.

He retired from the University of Notre Dame in 2010 and returned to Calvin University, where he serves as the first holder of the William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy.

He has trained many prominent philosophers working in metaphysics and epistemology including Michael Bergmann at Purdue and Michael Rea at Notre Dame, and Trenton Merricks working at University of Virginia.

After Plantinga completed 11th grade, his father urged him to skip his last year of high school and immediately enroll in college.

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, which he received with a talk titled, "Religion and Science: Where the Conflict Really Lies".

In 2014, Plantinga was the 30th most-cited contemporary author in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2017.

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.