Plantinga Honored for Work

Calvin College professor emeritus of philosophy Alvin Plantinga has been named winner of the 2012–2013 Nicholas Rescher Prize for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy.

Created in 2010 by the University of Pittsburgh and named for a member of that institution’s philosophy faculty, the prize recognizes a lifetime of achievement in systematic philosophy, according to a profile of Plantinga written by Myrna Anderson and published recently by Calvin College communications.

The Rescher Prize (which comes with a $25,000 award and a medallion) is the latest in a series of honors for the author of, among other works, God and Other Minds, The Nature of Necessity and Warranted Christian Belief.

Plantinga graduated Calvin in 1954 and moved on to The University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s in philosophy and then to Yale, where he earned his PhD. His first teaching job was at Wayne State University.

One of the first things Plantinga came up with was the free-will defense, an answer to those who argued that a benevolent, all-knowing God could not co-exist with an evil world. He argued that God, though all-knowing and all-loving, could create creatures with free will that would allow them to choose evil.