Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher and theologian who is a leading figure in the Reformed epistemology movement. He is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and a professor emeritus of philosophy at Calvin University.
After earning his doctorate in philosophy from Yale University, Plantinga became a professor at Wayne State University in 1958, taught at Calvin College from 1963 to 1982, and co-founded the Society of Christian Philosophers in 1983. A prominent Christian philosopher, he is best known for his contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics of modalities, and epistemology. He was described by Time magazine in 1980 as "America's leading Protestant philosopher of God".
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) and simplified in Knowledge and Christian Belief (2015). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975, received the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy in 2012, and was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2017.
Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His father, Cornelius A. Plantinga (1908–1994), was a Dutch philosopher from Garyp, Friesland, who earned a doctorate in philosophy from Duke University under William McDougall and William Stern. His mother, Lettie G. Bossenbroek (1908–2007), was a Dutch-American typist. Plantinga and his brother, Leon, were born when their father was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. In 1941, Cornelius began teaching at Huron College, so Plantinga spent fifth and sixth grade in Huron, South Dakota. In 1943, Cornelius moved to Jamestown College in Jamestown, North Dakota, where he taught Latin, Greek, philosophy, and psychology. Plantinga's younger brothers, Terrell and Cornelius Jr., were both born in Jamestown while their father was teaching there.
After finishing eleventh grade at Jamestown High School, Plantinga skipped his senior year to enroll at Jamestown College in 1949, at the age of sixteen. But in his first semester of college, his father moved to teach psychology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, so Plantinga transferred there in January 1950. Then, during his first semester at Calvin College, he applied for and won a scholarship to attend Harvard University, so he transferred colleges for the second time to enroll at Harvard in the fall of 1950.
Plantinga spent two semesters as an undergraduate at Harvard College, during which he took philosophy classes under Raphael Demos and logic classes under Willard Van Orman Quine. During a spring recess, he attended three philosophy classes taught by William Harry Jellema at Calvin College—experiences which he recalled as "a fateful week". He has described Jellema as "the most gifted teacher of philosophy I have ever encountered". Plantinga was so impressed with Jellema that he withdrew from Harvard and transferred back to Calvin College in order to study philosophy under him. He graduated from Calvin with a Bachelor of Arts in 1954 with a triple major in philosophy, psychology, and English literature. One of his classmates, Nicholas Wolterstorff, also studied under Jellema and became a philosopher.
In 1954, Plantinga began his graduate studies at the University of Michigan, where he studied under philosophers William Alston, William Frankena, and Richard Cartwright. He earned his Master of Arts in philosophy from the university in 1955. He then pursued doctoral studies at Yale University, where his professors included Paul Weiss and Brand Blanshard. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale in 1958. His doctoral dissertation, completed under Weiss's supervision, was titled, "Ethics and metaphysical naturalism".
Plantinga began his career as a philosophy instructor at Yale in 1957 focusing on metaphysics and epistemology. While teaching at Yale, he received an offer by George Nakhnikian of Wayne State University to join its philosophy faculty and did so as an associate professor in the fall of 1958, a choice he later called "one of the best decisions I ever made". It was as a professor at Wayne State that Plantinga began studying the works of Roderick Chisholm, of whom he later said, "I suppose there is no other contemporary philosopher [than Chisholm] from whom I have learned more over the years".
In 1963, Plantinga accepted an invitation to move to the philosophy department at Calvin College to replace Jellema, who was retiring at the age of 70. He remained at Calvin College for nineteen years, during which he was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1968–69; a Guggenheim Fellow in 1971 and 1972; a visiting fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1975–76; and the vice president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association from 1980 to 1981, then its president from 1981 to 1982. He was an associate professor of philosophy at Calvin College from 1963 to 1964, then a full professor from 1964 onwards. He also held various teaching appointments at Harvard Divinity School, the University of Oxford, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Illinois.
In 1982, Plantinga moved to the University of Notre Dame, where he was appointed the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy and the director of its Center for Philosophy of Religion. As a professor at Notre Dame, he served as the president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1982 to 1986, an organization which he co-founded. He also held named lectureships at Fordham University (1986), Princeton University (1990), Virginia Tech (1991), and the University of Florida (1995). He retired from full-time teaching at Notre Dame in 2010 (becoming a professor emeritus), but began teaching part-time in 2011 at Calvin College, where he became the inaugural holder of its William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy.
Notable students of Plantinga include the philosophers Michael Bergmann, Kelly James Clark, Robin Collins, Thomas Flint, Trenton Merricks, and Michael Rea. In 2014, Plantinga was the 30th most-cited contemporary author in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Plantinga is the author of more than 160 articles, essays, and books. In 1980, Time magazine described him as "America's leading Protestant philosopher of God". Canadian religious scholar John G. Stackhouse Jr. described him in 2001 as "arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century". Philosopher James Beilby described him in 2005 as "undoubtedly one of the world's most respected philosophers". Deane Baker of the University of Sydney wrote in 2007: "Few thinkers have had as much impact on contemporary philosophy as has Alvin Plantinga". According to theologians William Edgar and K. Scott Oliphint, "it would not be an overstatement to say that virtually all matters metaphysical and epistemological must address much of Plantinga's own work".
Plantinga has argued that some people can know that God exists as a basic belief, requiring no argument. He developed this argument in two different ways: firstly, in God and Other Minds (1967), by drawing an equivalence between the teleological argument and the common sense view that people have of other minds existing by analogy with their own minds. Plantinga has also developed a more comprehensive epistemological account of the nature of warrant which allows for the existence of God as a basic belief.
Plantinga has also argued that there is no logical inconsistency between the existence of evil and the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, wholly good God.
Plantinga proposed a "free-will defense" in a volume edited by Max Black in 1965, which attempts to refute the logical problem of evil, the argument that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God. Plantinga's argument (in a truncated form) states that "It is possible that God, even being omnipotent, could not create a world with free creatures who never choose evil. Furthermore, it is possible that God, even being omnibenevolent, would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures."