RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
Not in the same sense. If Foundationalism is defined in such a wide sense than I guess all POV are Foundationalist but that makes the term useless in practice.
Only if we assume modern foundationalisms began with Descartes. If we can find foundationalist elements in earlier thinkers (like Aquinas) and note they aren't using basic beliefs in the Cartesian or Cliffordian sense, then it's fine.
True, Clarkians favor coherentist models and Iw ouldn't say they hold to PBB.Just because an epistemology favors certain beliefs as being more central than others doesn't make those beliefs PBB.
Vantillian apologetics is transcendental in nature, so pressupositions can and do provide the spectacles through which we view the the world without being PBB.
True, but as Bahnsen was fond of saying (correctly, I think) that you don't prove your ultimate authority (presupposition) by another authority. If that is so, then presuppositions are acting like PBB.
Foundationalism suffers from the POV that you are either a Foundationalist or a skeptic but there are other POV that can possibly account for our knowledge, Rorty is great here.
Cartesian/Lockean models, yes. Alston and others, however, have run Rorty through the gauntlet (not to mention Plantinga's classic answer to Rorty).
What I mean is if Foundationalism is defined in such a wide sense as to include Van Til than the term becomes meaningless in practice. Because than anyone would be a foundationalist but no one criticism of Foundationalism would be applicable to anyone nor would any useable analysis of what Foundationalism is would be possible because you would have to qualify everything to point of death.
Not necessarily. Even my wide definition of foundationalism excludes a lot of major thinkers (Putnam, Rorty, all of postmodernism, Gordon Clark)
Why not make Foundationalism one thing and pressupositionalism another just to clarify things, because in practice you have to this anyway.
My interest was in seeing what the two have in common. I do not think they are synonyms.
This is to say that I could admit fine Van Til is a Foundationalist of sorts than some one could say "aha than you believe in PBB and your wrong for this reason" and I would reply no I'm not that kind of Foundationalist but this kind, which amounts to nothing.
I hold to PBB. There is nothing wrong with it. I just reject the modern construals of it. I don't fault CvT for holding to PBB (though that is more true of Bahnsen than CvT).
I don't know if Clark counts as a coherentist because there are other options than just that in the epistemological game. Both Van Til and Clark sought a Christian view of things.
Most Clarkians told me that to the degree they keep up with modern discussions, they hold to something like Coherentism. That was Geisler's reading of Clark, anyway.
Also what Bahnsen meant was that a P cannot be directly proven but indirectly proven, he said that often.
That is interesting about indirectly provingit.
I mean you raise excellent questions but what is the end game? What difference would it make if one could define Van Til as a Foundationalist?
Why do research at all, then? But to find the answer to a question.