Ontological Proofs Today

Description

The book Ontological Proofs Today, apart from the introduction, consists of six parts. Part II comprises papers each of which pertains either to historical ontological arguments, or to some other, rather new, ontological arguments, but what makes them stand out from the other papers in this volume, is the fact that they all treat of the omniscience or the omnipotence of God. Part III includes papers which introduce new ontological arguments for the existence of God, without referring to omniscience and omnipotence as the transparent attributes of God. The issue of the type of necessity with which ontological proofs work or may work is raised in the articles of Part IV. In Part V the semantics for some ontological proofs are defined. Part VI consists of papers which, although quite different from each other in terms of content, all explore some ontological issues, and formal ontology may be considered the link between them. Part VII comprises two articles, by R. E. Maydole and G. Oppy, mutually controversial and different in their assessment of some ontological proofs. CONTENTS Acknowledgements Authors of Contributed Papers Part I. Introduction 1. Guided Tour of the Book: Ontological Proofs Today Part II. Interpretation of Old Ontological Proofs. God’s Attributes 2. Ratio Anselmi 3. Two Ontological Arguments for the Existence of an Omniscient Being 4. A Modal Theistic Argument 5. A Debate on God: Anselm, Aquinas and Scotus 6. Three Versions of the Ontological Argument Part III. New Ontological Proofs 7. More Modest Ontological Argument 8. A New Modal Version of the Ontological Argument 9. A Cosmo-Ontological Argument for the Existence of a First Cause - perhaps God 10. A Gödelian Ontological Argument Improved Even More Part IV. Semantics for Ontological Proofs 11. Logic of Existence, Ontological Frames, Leibniz’s and Gödel’s Ontological Proofs 12. Fully Free Semantics for Anderson-like Ontological Proofs Part V. Ontological Proofs and Kinds of Necessity 13. Conceptual Modality and Ontological Argument 14. Does the Kind of Necessity which Is Represented by S5 Capture a Theologically Defensible Notion of a Necessary Being? 15. Modal Collapse in Gödel’s Ontological Proof 16. What Kind of Necessary Being Could God Be? Part VI. Ontological Proofs and Formal Ontology 17. On Grim’s Cantorian Anti-Ontological Argument 18. Concepts of Proof and Formalized Arguments ex gradibus perfectionis 19. Onto/Logical Melioration 20. Doomed to Fail: The Sad Epistemological Fate of Ontological Arguments 21. The Premises of Anselm’s Argument Part VII. Debate Maydole-Oppy 22. Maydole on Ontological Arguments 23. Ontological Arguments Redux 24. Response to Maydole 25. Reply to Oppy’s Response to ”Ontological Redux” Author Index Subject Index