The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that the inaugural Alvin Plantinga Prize in the amount of $10,000 has been awarded to Lara Buchak (Princeton University) for her essay, “Faith and Traditions.”
The APA has also awarded two honorable mentions in the amount of $5,000 each to Charity Anderson (Baylor University) for “Divine Hiddenness: An Evidential Argument” and to Aaron Segal (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for “Dependence, Transcendence, and Creaturely Freedom: On the Incompatibility of Three Theistic Doctrines.”
The Alvin Plantinga Prize is funded through the generosity of the Bossenbroek Family Foundation. This prize recognizes original essays that engage philosophical issues about or in substantial ways related to theism. Submissions were assessed according to canons of excellence for which Alvin Plantinga is eminent: clarity, rigor, and originality.
Peter Graham, chair of the APA committee on lectures, publications, and research, gave the following commendations for these three essays, “Lara Buchak’s prize-winning paper ‘Faith and Traditions’ addresses the nature of allegiance to, and break from, a tradition—whether it be Christianity or Islam or atheism or some other tradition. Allegiance to, and break from, a tradition has three central features. First, individuals who adhere to a tradition seem to respond dogmatically to evidence against their tradition. Second, individuals from different traditions appear to see the same evidence differently. And third, conversion from one tradition to another appears to happen suddenly or discontinuously rather than gradually and smoothly. Relying on the risky-commitment account of faith, Buchak argues for the surprising conclusion that these three features can all emerge from individuals rationally having faith in the core assumptions of their tradition.
Charity Anderson’s honorable-mention paper ‘Divine Hiddenness: An Evidential Argument’ addresses a common argument against the existence of God: if God existed, we would have very good evidence of his existence; since we do not have that evidence (since God seems to be hidden), God does not exist. Many see this argument as showing, like the logical argument from evil against the existence of God, that God’s existence is logically incompatible with the quality of the evidence we have for the existence of God. Anderson’s maneuver is to see the argument from divine hiddenness as an evidential argument, just as we now see the argument from evil not as a logical argument but as an evidential argument. Anderson’s paper then examines, relying on probability spaces, a very effective way of representing the argument from divine hiddenness and a series of persuasive challenges to the argument so construed.
Aaron Segal’s honorable-mention paper ‘Dependence, Transcendence, and Creaturely Freedom: On the Incompatibility of Three Theistic Doctrines’ argues in a sophisticated and original way—against Maimonides, among others—that deep dependence of the universe for its existence on God, the true transcendence of God from the universe, and robust creaturely freedom are jointly incompatible. Segal’s paper concludes with a philosophically rewarding discussion of which claim is best jettisoned, relying in a rewarding way on work from the late 19th and early 20th century Absolute Idealist Mary Calkins.”
Lara Buchak is a professor in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. She received her PhD from Princeton in 2009 and taught at UC Berkeley for 12 years before returning to Princeton. Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. In philosophy of religion, her primary research has been on the nature and rationality of faith, both in the religious and mundane sense. She argues that faith requires stopping one’s search for evidence and making a commitment—and maintaining that commitment in the face of counterevidence. She details when such faith is rational, and how it is beneficial to human life. She has also written about free will and about probabilistic arguments for and against theism. Outside of philosophy of religion, she is best known for her work in decision theory, which concerns how an individual ought to take risk into account when making decisions. She argues that individuals with different attitudes towards risk—considered as different ways to weight worse scenarios against better ones—can all be rational. She has recently applied this work to ethics and social decision-making.
Charity Anderson is an associate professor of philosophy at Baylor University. Her research is in epistemology and philosophy of religion, with a focus on issues concerning fallibilism, evidence, epistemic modals, invariantism, and knowledge norms. Anderson’s current research projects include the topics of divine hiddenness, evidential uptake, wishful thinking, and expanding awareness. She is currently the PI for a Templeton grant titled “Divine Hiddenness: Shifting the Debate.”
Aaron Segal is the Michael and Bella Guggenheim Senior Lecturer in the department of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He works primarily on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and Jewish philosophy, and has published in Mind, Nous, Philosophical Studies, Philosophers’ Imprint, Religious Studies, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, and elsewhere. Aaron co-edited (with Daniel Frank) the volumes Jewish Philosophy Past and Present: Contemporary Responses to Classical Sources (Routledge, 2017) and Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2021), and (with Samuel Lebens and Dani Rabinowitz) the volume Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age (Oxford, 2019). Aaron holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame (2013). For more information about Aaron’s research, please visit his website.
