The silly contest between Josh Rasmussen and SyeTenB demonstrates, once again, the need to do some sorting:
Regarding the YouTube interview:
There are at least three different things flying under the banner of "presuppositionalism"
1. There's the position of SyeTenB. He's a hack with a rabid internet following among a clique of pop Calvinist groupies.
2. That's not to be confused with academic versions of presuppositionalism. For instance:
Greg Welty, “The Conceptualist Argument,” in Colin Ruloff (ed.), Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology (Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming).
3. From another angle is the presuppositionalism of Vern Poythress. For instance:
4. There are roughly two competing schools of thought that call themselves presuppositionalists:
i) One derives from Cornelius Van Til. Second-generation Van Tilians include John Frame, the late Greg Bahnsen, and Vern Poythress. We might classify James Anderson as a third-generation Van Tilian.
However, he's been exposed to some other influences, like Plantinga and modal metaphysics.
Theistic conceptual realism belongs to a family of transcendental arguments. It's interesting how that's evolved. Kant's argument is more epistemological, in part because he doesn't have a robust theology to ground it. Kant might even be a closet atheist. And he's skeptical regarding our knowledge of the external world. So he can't say much of anything to back it up in terms of bedrock ontology.
Although Van Til's version is partly epistemological, he tries to ground it in the metaphysics of Reformed theism.
Greg Welty and James Anderson have done a lot to embed the epistemological side of the argument in modal metaphysics. I think it's a transcendental argument with an epistemological side, but they've done more to model and detail the necessary metaphysical conditions that make it possible.
ii) The other derives from the late Gordon Clark. Clark as an anti-empiricist.
Clark's followers make second-order knowledge necessary for first-order knowledge. You don't know anything unless you know how you know it. They make the justification of knowledge a necessary ingredient in knowledge itself. Here are two examples:
It's important to keep these two schools of thought separate, even though they both use the same designation. When you're accused of not understanding presuppositionalism, part of the problem is that there are competing schools of thought as well as different exponents with varying views.
I don't think Josh is under any obligation to understand SyeTenB's positionbecause there's not much there there.
Tx steve. I would always get nervous when sytenb would debate. I felt alot was wrong but couldn't articulate it like you. Thanks for what you do.
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