The philosopher Nicholas Paul Wolterstorff was born January 21, 1932 in Bigelow, Minnesota.

In 1953 Wolterstorff got his BA at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, Michigan) and graduated 1956 at Harvard (PhD in Philosophy). He was influenced by Harry Jellema , Henry Stob and Henry Zylstra .

After teaching at Calvin College (1959-1989) Wolterstorff went to Yale University in 1993, where he is the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology. He was also a visiting professor at Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Oxford University and Amsterdam Free University (Vrije Universiteit).

John Clayton (Professor of Religious Studies, Lancaster University) describes Wolterstorff as a leading philosopher of religion, with a growing reputation world-wide.

Together with other philosophers (Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, Richard Mouw) Wolterstorff was involved in setting up the magazine Faith and philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers.

Typical in Wolterstorff epistemology is the emphasis on common sense. Here he builds upon the ideas of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1910 - 1976), who approached knowledge "from the bottom-up". Instead of reasoning about transcendental conditions of knowledge, Wolterstorff just states, that knowledge and our knowing faculties are not the subject of our research, but have to be seen as its starting point.

Wolterstorff rejects classical foundationalism, which sees knowledge based upon insights in reality which are direct and indubitable. As there is no foundation of certainties, one is left with the question on how to interpret reality, what leads into the domain of hermeneutics.

Wolterstorff has written books on the subjects: metaphysics, aesthetics, epistemology and philosophy of religion.

Some of his books

• On Universals. A study in ontology (Chicago Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970).
• Reason within the bounds of religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976, 1984).
• Educating for responsible action (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).
• Art in Action (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).
• Worlds and works of art (Oxford: Clarendon Series of Oxford Univ. Press, 1980)
• Faith and rationality. Reason and belief in God [ed. with Alvin Plantinga] (Notre Dame: Univ. of Norte Dame Press, 1983)
• Rationality in the calvinian tradition [ed. with H. Hart & J. van der Hoeven] (Lanham: Univ. of america Press, 1983)
• Until justice and peace embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983).
• Lament for a son (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
• Divine discourse. Philosophical reflections on the claim that God speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995)
• John Locke and the ethics of belief (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
• Religion in the Public Square [with R. Audi] (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997)
• Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge, 2001)

External Links

• Wolterstorff's page at Yale