Science & invention / Religion
Alvin Plantinga
born 1932 · philosopher
Leading Christian philosopher of religion and Templeton Prize laureate, born in Ann Arbor, who began his professorial career at Wayne State University in Detroit (1958–1963).
- Born
Ann Arbor, Michigan
age 93- Birth name
- Alvin Carl Plantinga
- Detroit years
- 1958–1963
- Field
- Science & invention, Religion
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Plantinga was born in Ann Arbor in 1932 while his father was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and he later returned there for graduate work in philosophy before finishing his doctorate at Yale. In 1958 he left a Yale instructorship to join the philosophy department at Wayne State University in Detroit as an associate professor, a move he later called one of the best decisions of his life. Wayne State then had an unusually lively department, with Edmund Gettier and Héctor-Neri Castañeda among his colleagues, and it was there that he began a close study of Roderick Chisholm's work. In 1963 he moved to Calvin College in Grand Rapids and in 1982 to Notre Dame. Books such as God and Other Minds (1967) and Warranted Christian Belief (2000) made him the central figure of Reformed epistemology.
Highlights
- Associate professor of philosophy at Wayne State University, 1958–1963
- God and Other Minds (1967); The Nature of Necessity (1974)
- Warranted Christian Belief (2000), capstone of his epistemology trilogy
- Templeton Prize, 2017
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Worked here · 1958–1963
Wayne State University (then Wayne University)
He taught philosophy here as an associate professor alongside Edmund Gettier and Héctor-Neri Castañeda.