The Analytic Revival of Philosophy of Religion

The analytic revival of philosophy of religion is the loose but real shift, from the late nineteen sixties through the present, that brought the philosophy of religion back into the analytic mainstream after several decades of marginal status. The opening move is conventionally dated to Alvin Plantinga‘s God and Other Minds in 1967, which used the analytic style of argument to stake a claim that theistic belief deserved serious philosophical attention.

The institutional center of the revival was University of Notre Dame, particularly after Plantinga’s arrival in 1982 and the consolidation of the Center for Philosophy of Religion. Oxford, with Richard Swinburne‘s Nolloth Chair, was a parallel center on the British side. The revival was bilateral: the most influential atheist work of the period, J. L. Mackie‘s The Miracle of Theism, emerged from the same conversation.

The pattern of the revival is what the reader of this corpus is meant to feel: not a single dramatic argument settling anything, but a long sequence of careful exchanges in which the question is sharpened without being closed.