Using my $100 ebook card from Barnes & Noble (thank you, Mu!), I decided to catch up on some western philosophy. Over half of my gift card went to purchase Alvin Plantinga‘s Warrant: The Current Debate. A little bit of a misleading title, because I don’t think anybody but Plantinga was debating “warrant” much before him.

In college, my epistemology professor, Aron Edidin, was a friend of Plantinga and gave us some short articles by him to read. At the time, the class was not impressed – possibly because, as I know understand from having begun this book, our professor did a poor and, arguably, flat out inaccurate job of describing warrant (which he posited as being in addition to “justified” in the traditional formulation of “justified true belief” when, in fact, it was intended to replace “justified”).

My professor did say that Plantinga was writing a trilogy (it had not yet been finished at the time) of books about warrant that would culminate in a argument for a theistic god. At the time, I was a raging atheist, so this did not particularly excite me, but now my interest is piqued (of course, he doesn’t get to that until the third book).

So I am a handful of pages into Plantinga – far enough along to know that, though not entirely my fault, I have been until now misrepresented his work when thinking of it.

Continuing in this vein, I also dropped a $1.99 on a Barnes & Noble edition of William James’ classic, Varieties of Religious Experience.