During that same year, his father accepted a teaching job at Calvin University, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 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. Education Īfter Plantinga completed 11th grade, his father urged him to skip his last year of high school and immediately enroll in college. Another of his brothers, Leon, is an emeritus professor of musicology at Yale University. One of Plantinga's brothers, Cornelius 'Neal' Plantinga Jr., is a theologian and the former president of Calvin Theological Seminary. Plantinga's older daughter, Jane Plantinga Pauw, is a pastor at Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church ( PCUSA) in Seattle, Washington, and his younger daughter, Ann Kapteyn, has worked for Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International. Harry is also the director of the college's Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Both of his sons are professors at Calvin University, Carl in film studies and Harry in computer science. They have four children: Carl, Jane, Harry, and Ann.

Plantinga married Kathleen De Boer in 1955. 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. 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 was a first-generation immigrant, born in the Netherlands. Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Cornelius A. 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). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2017. In 2014, Plantinga was the 30th most-cited contemporary author in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

He has delivered the Gifford Lectures twice and was described by Time magazine as 'America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God'. Ī prominent Christian philosopher, Plantinga served as president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1983 to 1986. He later returned to Calvin University to become the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy.

O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. 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.įrom 1963 to 1982, Plantinga taught at Calvin University before accepting an appointment as the John A.

God freedom and evil by alvin plantinga