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The Proslogion marked what would be the beginning of Saint Anselm's famous and highly controversial ontological arguments for the existence of God. Anselm's first and most famous argument is found at the end of Chapter II, and it is followed by his second argument. Opinions concerning Anselm's twin ontological arguments widely differ, and have ...
A more recent ontological argument came from Kurt Gödel, who proposed a formal argument for God's existence. Norman Malcolm also revived the ontological argument in 1960 when he located a second, stronger ontological argument in Anselm's work; Alvin Plantinga challenged this argument and proposed an alternative, based on modal logic.
Étienne Gilson : Sens et nature de l’argument de saint Anselme, dans Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, vol. 9 (1934). Alvin Plantinga : The Ontological Argument, from St. Anselm to Contemporary Philosophers, Garden City, New York, Anchor Books, 1965. Katherine Rogers : Can Christianity be Proven?
The ontological argument is a defining example of the fusion of Hebrew and Greek thought. Philosophical realism was the dominant philosophical school of Anselm's day, and stemmed from Platonism . It held, in contrast to Nominalism , that things such as "green" and "big" were known as universals , which had a real existence in an abstract realm ...
In The Only Possible Argument, Kant questions both the ontological argument for God (as proposed by Saint Anselm) and the argument from design. Kant argues that the internal possibility of all things presupposes some existence: [1] Accordingly, there must be something whose nonexistence would cancel all internal possibility whatsoever.
Gaunilo's objection to the ontological argument has been criticised on several grounds. Anselm's own reply was essentially that Gaunilo had missed his point: any other being's existence is derived from God's, unnecessary in itself, and nonamenable to his ontological argument which can only ever properly apply to the single greatest being of all beings.
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The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm's ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: "God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding.