Alvin Plantinga is arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century. The Dutch-American Calvinist, raised in the midwest, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, USA.
Plantinga deserves this accolade for three reasons. First, he has taken up the two most important questions of our day: the problem of evil and the problem of knowledge.
Second, he has made fundamental contributions to these two questions. On the problem of evil, Plantinga's vaunted 'Free Will Defence' (to which we'll return in a moment) responded to the most trenchant form of this problem with a success rarely found in philosophy: for almost 20 years now, the discussion of the problem has shifted to other grounds because of the widespread acknowledgement of Plantinga's argument. In the case of epistemology (the theory of knowledge), his proposal is so recent that we must wait to see how it will fare. Indeed, the third volume of his epistemological trilogy on 'warrant' was published only last year (Warranted Christian Belief, Oxford University Press). So far, however, it seems to have met all of its contemporary challenges.
