Jeff Waddington compares Alvin Plantinga and Jonathan Edwards on the perennial anthropological question regarding the relationship between the intellect and the will. In 2000, distinguished Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga offered an account of how Christian belief squares with warrant in…
God and Necessity
Jared Oliphint and Nathan Shannon discuss Brian Leftow’s God and Necessity (Oxford University Press). In this volume, Leftow seeks to offer a metaphysic of modality. This leads him into a discussion of necessity and possibility, truth making, God’s nature, and divine simplicity.…
Intuition in Contemporary Philosophy
In this short essay, I want to draw out the nature and downfalls of a salient principle of analytic philosophy: the primacy of rational intuition. Philosophers think of rational intuition as the capacity in human persons to believe (and know)…
Will the Real Bonhoeffer Please Stand Up? Part 4
Having begun with Kant’s concept of the transcendental unity of apperception in order to establish God’s immanence Bonhoeffer was brought up against a potential philosophical problem. Kant’s Transcendentalism had a solipsistic tendency. In other words, if my mind is the…
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Consciousness and personality are perennial topics of conversation among philosophers. But that doesn’t mean they’re topics only for the academy. These subjects touch each of us deeply, because they are at the very heart of our existence. That’s why they live in high culture, low…
Will the Real Bonhoeffer Please Stand Up? Part 3
Kant’s Copernican Revolution might have been better described as a theological warhead aimed directly at theology. The immediate epistemological carnage caused by Kantian Transcendentalism can be witnessed initially in Schleiermacher’s theology of Gefühl (feeling). After all, Kant had rendered any…
Van Til’s Concrete Universal
Laurence O’Donnell, III, a Cornelius Van Til scholar and critic, has labeled Van Til’s trinitarian theology “idiosyncratic.” He made this remark with respect to Van Til’s conception of the trinity as a concrete universal. In response to O’Donnell’s ascription of idiosyncrasy,…
Will the Real Bonhoeffer Please Stand Up? Part 2
In our last post we concluded that juxtaposing Bonhoeffer against himself might not be the most useful way to determine whether the man was a pietistic evangelical or a German liberal. So, how do we sally forth from what some…
From Absolute Idealism to Analytic Philosophy, Part 2
In a previous post, I gave a brief historical sketch of the movement from nineteenth century absolute idealism to twentieth century analytic philosophy. In this post, I will survey the response Cornelius Van Til gave to absolute idealism, and then…
From Absolute Idealism to Analytic Philosophy, Part 1
In this post, I plan to give a brief historical sketch of the movement from nineteenth century absolute idealism to twentieth century analytic philosophy. In a follow-up post, I will survey the response Cornelius Van Til gave to absolute idealism,…
