St. Anselm of Canterbury - Norman Malcolm (essay date 1960)

Norman Malcolm (essay date 1960)

SOURCE: Malcolm, Norman. “Anselm's Ontological Arguments.” Philosophical Review 69 (1960): 41-62.

[In the following essay, Malcolm considers whether Anselm's ontological arguments stand up to the scrutiny of logic as well as of faith.]

I believe that in Anselm's Proslogion and Responsio editoris there are two different pieces of reasoning which he did not distinguish from one another, and that a good deal of light may be shed on the philosophical problem of “the ontological argument” if we do distinguish them. In Chapter 2 of the Proslogion1 Anselm says that we believe that God is something a greater than which cannot be conceived. (The Latin is aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit. Anselm sometimes uses the alternative expressions aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest, id quo maius cogitari nequit, aliquid quo maius cogitari non valet.)...

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