Alvin C. Plantinga Collection, 1950-2010 | Heritage Hall, Hekman Library

By Ed Gerritsen, February 2014

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Collection Overview

Title: Alvin C. Plantinga Collection, 1950-2010

ID: COLL/533

Primary Creator: Plantinga, Alvin C. (1932-)

Extent: 15.5 Cubic Feet. More info below.

Arrangement: Folder level description

Date Acquired: 00/00/2012

Abstract

The collections contains Alvin Plantinga's notes and papers (1950-1955) while a student, and correspondence (1956-2010) that spans his teaching and writing careers on such topics as God, freedom, evil, creation and evolution. His writings (1961-2010) details his arguments relating to God whose existence does not present a logical inconsistency with the existence of evil, free will for humans, and that a creation with moral good necessitates the existence of moral evil. The collections also details his argument that if evolution is true, it undermines naturalism because if both evolution and naturalism are true, human cognitive faculties must evolve directed toward survival rather than truth, and these faculties would be unreliable in discerning truth. On the other hand, if God created man "in his image" by way of an evolutionary process (or any other means), then Plantinga argues our faculties would probably be reliable.

Biographical Note

At the end of 11th grade, Plantinga's father urged Plantinga to skip his last year of high school and enroll in college and in 1949, a few months before his 17th birthday, he enrolled in Jamestown College, in Jamestown, North Dakota. When his father joined the faculty at Calvin College in January 1950, the younger Plantinga enrolled in Calvin College. During his first semester at Calvin, Plantinga was awarded a scholarship to attend Harvard University, where her spent two semesters but returned to Calvin in 1951 to study philosophy with William Harry Jellema In 1954. Plantinga began his graduate studies at the University of Michigan with William Alston, William Frankena, and Richard Cartwright, and in 1955 transferred to Yale University where he received his PhD in 1958.

Plantinga taught philosophy at Yale, 1957-1958; Wayne State University, 1958-1963; Calvin College (replacing the retiring Jellema), 1963-1982; and the University of Notre Dame, 1982-2010. He has honorary degrees from Glasgow University (1982), North Park College (1994), the Free University of Amsterdam (1995), Brigham Young University (1996), and Valparaiso University (1999). He was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971-1972, and elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975. In 2006 the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion renamed its Distinguished Scholar Fellowship as the Alvin Plantinga Fellowship. 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 awarded Plantinga the Rescher Prize.

Plantinga was born on 15 November 1932, in Ann Arbor, Michigan to Cornelius A. Plantinga (1908-1994) and Lettie G. Bossenbroek (1908-2007). Plantinga's father, an immigrant from Friesland, the Netherlands, earned Master's Degree in psychology and a PhD in philosophy from Duke University. Alvin Plantinga married Kathleen De Boer in 1955 and they have four children: Carl, Jane, Harry, and Ann. Both sons are professors at Calvin College, Carl in Film Studies and Harry in computer science; daughter, Jane Plantinga Pauw, is a pastor at Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Seattle, Washington, and his daughter, Ann Kapteyn, is a missionary in Cameroon working for Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Administrative Information

Repository: Heritage Hall, Hekman Library

Alternate Extent Statement: 30 Boxes

Acquisition Source: Alvin Plantinga, 2012, 2013

Other Note: Acc. No. 12.66, 13.15

Box and Folder Listing

Browse by Series:

[Series 1: [General Materials]],
[Series 2: Correspondence, 1950-2010],
[Series 3: Writings, 1963-2008, undated],
[Series 4: Articles],
[Series 5: Research Material],
[Series 6: Research Material; A Theory of Content and Other Essays, by Jerry Fodor, 1990, 1972-1981, undated],
[All]

Series 1: [General Materials]

Box 1

Folder 1: Curriculum Vitae

Folder 2: Paper: "Elements of Pre-Socratic Thought in "Phaedo" and the "Times" --- 1951

Folder 3: Paper: "Carlyle and the Problem of Faith" --- 1950's

Folder 4: Paper: "A.E. Taylor: Does God Exist?" --- 1950's

Folder 5: Class Notes on Ethics Courses --- 1950's

Folder 6-7: Papers Written for Class Assignments --- 1950-1954

Folder 8: Class Notes on Contemporary Psychology --- 1952

Folder 9: Class Notes on History of Psychology --- 1952-1953

Folder 10: Class Notes on Theory of Learning --- 1950-1952

Folder 11: Class Notes on 19th Century Prose --- 1952

Folder 12: Class Notes on Advanced General Psychology --- 1952

Folder 13: Paper: "Whitehead's Concept of Causality" --- 1954

Folder 14: Papers:

Item 1: “The metaphysics of Spinoza”
Item 2: “Taylor’s Theistic Arguments” --- 1955

Folder 15: Class notes for Ф of Religion Course at University of Michigan --- 1955

Folder 16: Paper: "Explanation of Ethics" --- 1955

Folder 17: Lecture Notes on Plato-Harvard College --- 1951