Stuart C. Hackett

Stuart Cornelius Hackett (1925–2012) was an American evangelical philosopher who taught for many years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Trained in philosophy and influenced by both Kantian rationalism and Christian apologetic concerns, Hackett developed a distinctive program of rational empiricism that sought to reconcile a priori categories of reason with empirical data in defense of theism. His major early work, The Resurrection of Theism (1957; revised 1982), mounted a sustained critique of Humean and Kantian objections to natural theology and reformulated the kalam cosmological argument long before its better-known revival by William Lane Craig, who has repeatedly acknowledged Hackett as the proximate stimulus for his own program. Hackett also wrote The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim (1984) and Oriental Philosophy: A Westerner's Guide to Eastern Thought (1979), the latter engaging Hindu and Buddhist metaphysics from a Christian rational perspective. Methodologically he combined deductive metaphysical argumentation with evidentialist apologetics, defending the rational accessibility of God's existence against logical positivism, naturalism, and fideistic Reformed epistemology. Hackett's influence has been largely mediated through Craig's reception, and his work remains less widely discussed than that of contemporaries such as Plantinga or Swinburne, though it is recognized as an important link between mid-century evangelical philosophy and the later analytic philosophy of religion.