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18 - William P. Alston

Daniel Howard-Snyder
Affiliation:
Western Washington University
Graham Oppy
Affiliation:
Monash University, Austrailia
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Summary

William P. Alston was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on 29 November 1921 to Eunice Schoolfield and William Alston. He graduated from high school at age fifteen, and studied music at Centenary College. While serving in the US Army in the Second World War (1942–6), he read philosophy extensively. He earned his PhD in 1951 from the University of Chicago; Alston's dissertation on Alfred North Whitehead was written under the direction of Charles Hartshorne. He held appointments at the University of Michigan (1949–71), Rutgers University (1971–6), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1976–80), and Syracuse University (1980–92). Since 1992, he has been Professor Emeritus at Syracuse, where he continued to teach until 2000. During his career, Alston received many honours. He contributed significantly to metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of language, psychology and religion.

One will not find a synoptic philosophy of religion in Alston's work, nor much natural theology, although he had an abiding appreciation for both. Rather, one finds historically informed treatments of various problems that arise within theistic religions generally and Christianity specifically, treatments enriched by the tools of analytic philosophy. Alston has been at the forefront of the recent trend for Anglo-American Christian philosophers to take more seriously the Augustinian motto, ‘faith seeking understanding’. (He was raised a Methodist and, through various ups and downs and ins and outs, returned to the Church to stay in the mid-1970s.

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Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2009

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  • William P. Alston
  • Edited by Graham Oppy, Monash University, Austrailia
  • Book: The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844654673.019
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  • William P. Alston
  • Edited by Graham Oppy, Monash University, Austrailia
  • Book: The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844654673.019
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • William P. Alston
  • Edited by Graham Oppy, Monash University, Austrailia
  • Book: The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844654673.019
Available formats
×