Anselm's Discovery: A Re-Examination of the Ontological Proof for God's Existence

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Did Anselm, in his Ontological Argument (first advanced around 1070), make one of the greatest intellectual discoveries of all time, or did he merely fall into an interesting blunder? In his day, Anselm was criticized by Gaunilo. Subsequent philosophers have generally considered Gaunilo’s criticisms to be weighty. Descartes’s attempt to resuscitate Anselm’s argument led to Kant's supposed refutation, which most later philosophers have considered to be fundamentally sound. Charles Hartshorne has done more than any other writer to bring back the Ontological Argument as a major problem of modern philosophical analysis, and Anselm’s Discovery is his most systematic exposition of the history of the subject. According to Hartshorne, generations of philosophers have read Anselm superficially, and have failed to see that Anselm presented two forms of the Argument, the second involving a genuine conceptual breakthrough. Charles Hartshorne is the author of A Natural Theology for Our Time and The Logic of Perfection. He is the subject of and leading contributor to Volume XX of The Library of Living Philosophers, The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, edited by Lewis E. Hahn. Cover Title Page Preface Contents Part One: Necessarily Somehow Actualized: Anselm’s Proof in New Perspective 1. Blunder or Discovery? 2. The Overestimation of Gaunilo 3. What the Proof Claims to Prove 4. The Definition of God: a Dilemma 5. Neoclassical Resolution of the Dilemma 6. Existence a Predicate? 7. The Second or Strong Form of the Proof 8. Malcolm and Findlay: a Fresh Start? 9. The Necessary Is Abstract 10. In What Sense the Proof Is Inconclusive 11. Predicates, Individuals, and States 12. The Role of Faith 13. Is the Proof Platonic? 14. A Theory of Modality 15. Contingency and Observability 16. The Proof and Logical Rules 17. Anselm’s Appeal to Rules 18. Refutation of Some Refutations 19. The Argument of Proslogium III 20. Proslogium II, III, and Anselm’s Principle 21. Definite Thought Is about Something 22. The Proof and Pantheism 23. Some Recent Criticisms of the Proof 24. The Proof and the Other Theistic Arguments Part Two: A Critical Survey of Responses to Anselm’s Proof 1. Anticipations of the Proof 2. A Strange Story 3. Gaunilo 4. The Scholastics: St. Thomas 5. Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes 6. Spinoza 7. Ralph Cudworth 8. Leibniz 9. Hume 10. Kant 11. Hegel 12. Ludwig Feuerbach 13. Robert Flint 14. W. E. Hocking, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana 15. R. G. Collingwood 16. Hans Reichenbach 17. J. N. Findlay 18. Robert S. Hartman 19. Jan Berg 20. Jerome Shaffer 21. Heinrich Scholz and Frederic Fisch 22. Conclusions Bibliography Acknowledgments Index of Names Index of Topics Back Cover