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The Ontological Argument of St. Anselm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

S. A. Grave
S. A. Grave
Affiliation:
The University of Western Australia
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Extract

The first aim of this paper is to try and determine what St. Anselm meant in his original argument in the Proslogion (ch. 2). This needs to be done because not only are the writers who expound his demonstration divided in their interpretations of it, and these interpretations quite different, but, very strangely, one does not find that they mention that there is any ambiguity and that other writers construe Anselm's words differently from themselves. Since there are in fact two arguments in the classical formulation of his proof, I want to try and disentangle them, decide which of them Anselm intendedand what is its connection with the demonstration in the third chapter of the Proslogion, and thus to offer an opinion on what exactly the ontological argument of St. Anselm is. Then on the basis of the clarification, I hope to show what it was that Gaunilo and St. Thomas attacked, to touch briefly on the relation of the 17th century ontological argument to Anselm's, and in general to indicate the curious round-aboutness of the historical criticism of Anselm. Anselm argued and Gaunilo and Thomas refuted something, though not, I think, precisely what Anselm meant, or, at any rate, not all that he meant. Actually it was Descartes that Thomas refuted by refuting half of Anselm. Kant refuted the other half of Anselm in an irrelevant criticism of Descartes. So that it could properly be said that Anselm's proof has been broken by philosophers who were either only partly aware of what he was maintaining, or who never had him in mind at all. Finally, because the important thing about the ontological argument, in my opinion, is not whether it is a demonstration of God's existence, but whether its refutation is a demonstration of the impossibility of God's existence, and because this question seems to arise most sharply in connexion with Anselm's position, I want to say something about that.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 27 , Issue 100 , January 1952 , pp. 30 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1952

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References

page 31 note 1 Proslogion. S. Anselmi Opera Omnia, edit. Schmitt, Vol. I, p. 112.

page 31 note 2 Summa Theologica, IQ., 13, A. 5.

page 31 note 3 Études sur le Role de la Pensée Médiévale dans la Formation du Système Cartésien. p. 218.

page 32 note 1 Et certe id quo maius cogitari nequit, non potest esse in solo intellectu. Si enim vel in solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re, quod maius est. Si ergo id quo maius cogitari non potest, est in solo intellectu: id ipsum quo maius cogitari non potest, est quo maius cogitari potest. Sed certe hoc esse non potest. Existit ergo procul dubio aliquid quo maius cogitari non valet, et in intellectu et in re: Proslogion ch. 2 (Schmitt) Vol. 1, p. 101–102.

page 32 note 2 Maius illo erit quidquid etiam in re fuerit, ac sic maius omnibus minus erit aliquo et non erit maius omnibus, Gaunilonis Pro Insipiente in Schmitt. Vol. 1, p. 125.

page 32 note 3 Responsio Editoris (“Liber Apologeticus”) Ch. 5. Schmitt, p. 134.

page 33 note 1 Schmitt, p. 126. It is interesting to find this pseudo-Anselmian argument embedded in Spinoza's proof of God (Ethics I, Prop. XI, 3). “If then what necessarily exists is nothing but finite beings, such finite beings are more powerful than a being absolutely infinite”, which, Spinoza says, is absurd. On the contrary it is a truism that an actual finite being is more powerful than a hypothetical infinite being.

page 33 note 2 Nam potest cogitari esse aliquid, quod non possit cogitari non esse; quod maius est quam quod non esse cogitari potest. Quare si id quo maius nequit cogitari, potest cogitari non esse: id ipsum quo maius cogitari nequit, non est id quo maius cogitari nequit. Proslogion. ch. 3 op. cit., p. 102.

page 34 note 1 Reply Obj. I.

page 34 note 2 A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza, pp. 50 ff.

page 34 note 3 Animadversiones in pattern generalem Phil. Cart., Gerhardt's Leibniz, IV, P. 359.

page 35 note 1 Eodem enim modo necesse est poni rem et nominis rationem.

page 35 note 2 Critique of Pure Reason (Kemp Smith) p. 504.

page 36 note 1 Nam quo maius cogitari nequit non potest cogitari esse nisi sine initio. Quidquid autem potest cogitari esse et non est, per initium potest cogitari esse. Non ergo quo maius cogitari nequit cogitari potest esse et non est. Schmitt, Vol. r, p. 131.

page 37 note 1 It has been suggested to me that it would be better to say noncomittally “If there is a God, then there is at least one necessary existential proposition, viz: ‘There is something which has the essence E’, where E is the essence or nature of God”. I have preferred to use the phrase in the text because the Christian doctrine of the existence of God with the logic of which I am concerned is that absolutely (though not to us) the denial of God's existence is self-contradictory and consequently the assertion of it is absolutely (though not by us) an analytic proposition.

page 38 note 1 Mind, April 1935, p. 144.

page 38 note 2 Summa Theologica I, Q 2, A I; Contra Gentiles I, 11.

page 38 note 3 Proslogion. Ch. 3.