These foundational beliefs are called “properly basic beliefs.” Thus, on classical foundationalism, all my beliefs are either properly basic, or they are deduced, inferred, or otherwise reasoned from these properly basic beliefs. My belief “there is a tree” is formed simply because “I am being appeared to treely,” and thus I immediately form the belief, without inference, that the tree is there (I do not, for example, reason to myself that “if I see the image of a tree there, there must be a tree there.” I form the belief immediately, without evidence). Propositions such as “2+2=4” are foundational because once I understand what the numerals mean, the proposition is obviously true to me. And I believe these latter propositions not because I have evidence for them, but simply because I can “see” they are true. But there are foundational propositions as well, foundational in the sense that they are the starting points for my belief structure.
In order to understand his view, we need to understand classical foundationalism, a major theory of knowledge that precedes Plantinga’s modification.Īccording to classical foundationalism, most propositions I believe, I believe based on evidence. We will conduct a brief overview of Plantinga’s view here. In epistemology as well, Plantinga has changed the debate with his Reformed Epistemology, a philosophical view which allows that belief in God is rational without evidence. Because of these arguments, Plantinga is widely regarded to have changed the debate on the problem of evil in analytic philosophy. Using modal logic, he argued that it is possible that in any possible world God could have created with free will in it, people would always have freely chosen to sin. The critical reception of the book was overwhelmingly positive, and one reviewer claimed it was “one of the most important to have appeared in this century on the philosophy of religion.” In God, Freedom and Evil (1974), he argued for a version of the free will defense for the problem of evil. In his first book published in 1967, God and Other Minds, he argued that believing in the existence of God was just as rational as believing in other minds. Plantinga has singlehandedly changed the debate in several areas of analytic philosophy.
in philosophy from Yale University in 1958. O’Brien professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. For the previous entries in the series, and other work by Mark, click here.Īlvin Plantinga (1932- ), is a contemporary Christian philosopher who has had an enormous impact on modern philosophy of religion in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and arguments for God’s existence. Mark Hansard continues his series on Faith and Reason, exploring a key twentieth- and twenty-first century philosopher.
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