During my free time this semester, I will be working on a project that I hope will be turned into a paper and/or presentation. I have an interest in Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, and for the past few years I’ve been reading up on different sub-debates within that particular discussion. This argument is a bit unwieldy in it’s current form, lacking precise and persuasive premises (where persuasive means something like ‘reasonable for a large portion of the philosophical community’). The gist of the argument might be summed up as follows:
“The conjunction evolution and naturalism leaves the existence of our purportedly rational cognitive faculties unexplained or very improbable.”
You can find full expositions of the argument all over the internet, and I have no intention of adding another string of bits to the collection. Instead, if you are relatively unfamiliar with the debate then I’ll just suggest you start with Plantinga himself (here is an interesting recent presentation). With that bit said, what I’ll be doing the next [months? years?] will be a kind of review of some of the major criticisms of the argument from the volume of essays devoted to it (amz) entitled Naturalism Defeated? I have notes done on the first chapter and I’ll probably upload them piecemeal over the next week.
Filed under: EAAN, Philosophy Tagged: | Alvin Plantinga, EAAN, Philosophy
