One thing I notice when it comes assessing the merits of presuppositionalism is that lots of folks aren't picking the best examples that presuppositionalism has to offer.
1. Van Til
One thing critics frequently fail to make allowance for is that Van Til delegated the defense of Scripture to his colleagues in the NT dept. (Ned Stonehouse) and OT dept. (E. Y. Young). He was a philosophical thinker who played to his own strength and specialty.
2. Vern Poythress
He's the prolific polymath at WTS. Most of his books are available for free:
Many of his books have a presuppositional underpinning, but that's more explicit and pervasive on particular topics, viz.
There are a couple of limitations to his apologetic:
i) His books are generally written for a popular audience (his monograph on logic is an exception), so he holds a lot in reserve.
ii) I'd say he has a certain antipathy to philosophical theology and modal metaphysics. From his perspective, it's too rationalistic, failing to honor divine transcendence and incomprehensibility. He's a critic of univocal God-talk. Those scruples inhibit his opportunities to justify or provide detailed models of how Christian theism grounds reality.
3. James Anderson
It's sometimes difficult to separate the work of James Anderson from Greg Welty, because they collaborate (esp. on modal metaphysics). One of his early writings combined insights from Plantinga and Van Til on Christian epistemology:
Anderson has explicated and defended theistic conceptual realism in his own writings:
In addition to technical writing, he writes at a popular level:
4. Greg Welty
Finally, there's his sometime collaborator Greg Welty. Welty is too eclectic to be a presuppositionalist. However, his work on theistic conceptual realism is a way to cash out the transcendental argument for God. In that regard, the work of Welty and Anderson represents a shift in emphasis from epistemology to modal metaphysics in presuppositional apologetics. I may have had something to do with that. When Welty was a post-grad student at Oxford, I encouraged him to pick a thesis/dissertation topic on modal metaphysics rather than epistemology because I thought (and still think) that's more fundamental and interesting than epistemology. Representative examples include:
“Theistic Conceptual Realism,” ch. 3 of Paul Gould (ed.), Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
Welty's position continues to evolve. He recently participated at this event:
Read paper: “A Response to William Lane Craig’s God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism,” at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division 2019 Annual Meeting (January 9 th). This ‘Author Meets Critics’ session also included a response to Craig from Peter van Inwagen, and a reply to both papers by William Lane Craig.
And he has another contribution in the pipeline which I expect will continue to develop and refine theistic conceptual realism:
“The Conceptualist Argument,” in Colin Ruloff (ed.), Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology (Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming).
In taking stock of the fortunes of presuppositionalism, the contributions of Anderson, Welty, and Poythress represent the go-to material. I'd add that Paul Manata is a behind-the-scenes consultant on these projects as well.
Out of curiosity Steve, have you ever gone across a presuppositional critique of feminist standpoint epistemologies? I'm working on an honours thesis, part of which involves that, but haven't been able to find any academic papers on the subject, so any input would certainly be helpful.
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