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 6: Research Material; A Theory of Content and Other Essays, by Jerry Fodor, 1990 --- 1972-1981, undated

Chapters 2 and 3 have marginalia from Plantinga.

Box 27

Folder 5: "Rationality and Religious Belief" --- 1977
Folder 6: "The Sense of the Heart," (W. Edwards) --- nd
Folder 7: Frisian Thought
Folder 8: "Logic, Meaning, and Conceptual Role," Journal of Philosophy --- 1977
Folder 9: The Concept of Evil
Folder 10: "Could God Have Created us in an Idyllic World?," (R.M. Adams) --- nd
Folder 11: "The Probabilistic Problem of Evil," (R. Otte) --- nd
Folder 12: "The Intrinsic Value in Disjunctive States of Affairs" (R.M. Chisholm) --- nd
Folder 13: "Introductory Notes on the Theory of Truth," (Tyler Burge) --- 1972
Folder 14: "Carnapis Inductive Logic," (W.C. Salmon) --- nd
Folder 15: "A Good God," (Ulf Gorman) --- nd

Box 28

Folder 1: "Comments on Alston's "Religious Experience and Religious Belief"," (P. Vaninwagen) --- nd
Folder 2: "The Meaning of a Proper Name," (J. L. Pollock) --- nd
Folder 3: "The Resurrection Hope," (H.S. Strandness) --- nd
Folder 4: "The Problem of Other Minds," (S. Shoemaker) --- nd
Folder 5: "Possible Worlds" and "Propositional Modalities," (J.L. Pollock) --- nd
Folder 6: "A Problem about the Dynamics of Belief" (J. Perry) --- nd
Folder 7: "Explaining the Paradoxes: The Cantorian Way Out," (C. Menzel) --- nd
Folder 8: "Paradoxes, Large Sets, and Proper Classes," (C. Menzel) --- nd
Folder 9: "Could God have Created a Perfect World?," (P. Mellema) --- nd
Folder 10: "A New Actualist Model Semantics," and "A problem for Actualism on Possible Worlds," (A. McMichael) --- nd
Folder 11: "Reflections on Christian Philosophy," (R. McInerny) --- nd
Folder 12: Chapters of Book on the Divine, (R.M. Adams) --- nd
Folder 13: Article: "Leibnz on Possible Worlds" (B. Mates), Paper: "Individuals and Modality in the Philosophy of Leibnz" --- nd
Folder 14: "Bar-on Spinoza's Ontological Proof," (R.B. Marcus) --- nd
Folder 15: "A Proposed Solution to a Puzzle about Belief," (Marcus on Kripke) --- nd
Folder 16: "Space, Yes; Time, No," (Frederick Manfred) --- 1981
Folder 17: "The Virtue of Faith" and "Involuntary Sins," (R.M. Adams) --- nd
Folder 18: "Possible Worlds" and "Plantinga on Possible Worlds," (J.L. Pollock), reply by A.C.P. --- nd

Box 29

Folder 1: "Ratzsch on Kuyper" --- nd
Folder 2: "Fates and Faces of Epistemology," (E. Sosa) --- nd
Folder 3: "A Puzzle about Belief," (S.A. Kripke) --- nd
Folder 4: "Proper Names and Direct Reference on Proper Names in Belief and Ascriptions," (T. McKay) --- nd
Folder 5: "Divine Simplicity," (W.E. Mann) --- nd
Folder 6: "Simplicity and Immutability," (W.E. Mann) --- nd
Folder 7: "Identity and Survival and Related Material" (D. Lewis) --- nd
Folder 8: "Exposition of the Gospel of John," (St. Thomas Aquinas) --- nd
Folder 9: "Sketch of a Theory of Language" "Thinking about an Object," (J.L. Pollock) --- nd
Folder 10: "The Propositional Theory of Language" "Lotteries, Horseraces, Probability and Projection," (J.L. Pollock) --- nd
Folder 11: "Putnam's Paradox," (D. Lewis) --- nd
Folder 12: Articles on Evolution --- nd
Folder 13: "Works and Worlds of Art," (Wolterstorff) --- nd
Folder 14: "Decisional Learning," (N. Wolterstorff) --- nd
Folder 15: Wolterstorff's Writings on Ontology --- nd
Folder 16: "Meaning and Being in Art," (N. Wolterstorff) --- nd

Box 30

Folder 1: Propositional Attitudes, (Diana Akerman) --- nd
Folder 2: Diana Ackerman --- nd
Folder 3: H. Pietersma --- nd
Folder 4: B.C. Van Fraassen --- nd
Folder 5: Richard Foley --- nd
Folder 6: T.P. Flint --- nd
Folder 7: "Accidental Necessity," (A.J. Freddoso) --- nd
Folder 8: "Snapshot Ockhamism," (J. Fischer) --- nd
Folder 9: R.J. Feenstra --- 1977
Folder 10: R.M. Adams --- nd
Folder 11: W.P. Alston --- nd
Folder 12: David Kaplan --- nd

Box 31

Folder 1: Kit Fine --- nd
Folder 2: Thomas Jager --- nd
Folder 3: R.W. Gale --- nd
Folder 4: David Kaplan --- nd
Folder 5: A Theory of Content and Other Essays --- 1990