Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: presupposition

  • Van Til’s Argument Part II

    In our last post, we dealt with the claims made over at The Gospel Coalition Blog that Van Til did not make an argument while setting forth his methodology. “Roberto G” made that claim, and we dealt with that sufficiently for the time being. Now, we will deal with Doug Perry’s assertion that Van Til’s “legacy” has “given us the school [of] circular reasoning held by most presuppositionalists”. His sentence is rather garbled, and none too clear, but it seems to be saying that transcendental argumentation is circular, as far as I can tell. Now, even if this isn’t precisely …

  • Van Til’s Argument Part I

    In the comment section of Justin Taylor’s post, we have already seen perhaps the most common claims made by opponents of the covenantal apologetic. By “Roberto G”, we have the claim that Van Til didn’t make an argument; and by Doug Perry, we have the claim that the argument is circular. To head off any claims that I misunderstand what they have to say, let me quote the two gentlemen in question on the specified topics, and then I’ll deal with their comments as a whole in later posts, as I’ve decided to make this a short series, to …

  • Presuppositionalist Concept of Presupposition

    Don Collett argues that traditional forms of argument do not do justice to presupposition as a concept. He works from Peter Strawson’s semantic account of presupposition.

    According to Strawson, a statement A may be said to presuppose a statement B if B is a necessary precondition of the truth-or-falsity of A. Strawson’s interpretation of the concept of presupposition has been restated in succinct fashion by Bas van Fraassen as follows:

    A presupposes B if and only if A is neither true nor false unless B is true.

    This may also be stated as follows:

    (1) A presupposes B if