Ontological arguments for the existence of...
Transcript of Ontological arguments for the existence of...
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Ontological arguments for the existence of God
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St. Anselm (1033–1109)
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St. Anselm’s Proslogion
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The basic assumptions of Anselm’s argument
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A crucial definition...
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A crucial distinction...
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A crucial principle...
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A crucial strategy...
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Anselm’s version of the ontological argument
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The target of Anselm’s reductio is the proposition that “God exists in the understanding alone”.
And since this assumption leads to an absurdity (that we can conceive of a being greater than the greatest conceivable being) our initial assumption must be false.
So, God exists both in the understanding and in reality
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Is Anselm’s ontological argument convincing?
Evaluating Anselm’s ontological argument
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“I remember the precise moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking along Trinity Lane at Cambridge University, when I saw in a flash that the ontological argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco; on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air and exclaimed as I caught it: ‘Great scott... the ontological argument is sound!’...”
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“It is much easier to feel convinced that the Ontological argument must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies...”
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So what’s wrong with Anselm’s argument exactly?
Is Anselm’s reasoning really on the right track?
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Guanilo of Marmoutier’s criticism of Anselm’s reasoning
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Guanilo’s lost island parody argument...
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What’s the point?
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Guanilo of Marmoutier’s criticism of Anselm’s reasoning
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A possible Anselmian response to Guanilo...
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Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804)objection to Anselm’s argument
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Immanuel Kant
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Is ‘existence’ really a predicate term?
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Is ‘existence’ really a predicate term?
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Another way to put the point of Kant’s criticism...
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Is premise (3) of Kant’s argument true? Is it true that saying of some X that ‘it exists’ adds nothing new?
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Is ‘existence’ really a great making predicate?
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Does the ontological argument beg the question?
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All along, we’ve been treating “God is the (GCB)” as a a kind of definitional 1st
premise. But, isn’t this circular reasoning?
Maybe to avoid the circularity worry we would need to start out like this instead...
Is a non-circular version of the argument any good?
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But now the conclusion stated in (6) is a bit underwhelming isn’t it?
Is there another version of the ontological argument that works?
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A really simple version of the modal ontological argument
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Modal logic and possible worlds
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A possible world is just a hypothetical way the world could have been
A really simple version of the modal ontological argument
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Modal logic and possible worlds talk...
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Modal logic and possible worlds talk...
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Modal logic and possible worlds talk...
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Modal logic and possible worlds talk...
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Axiom of S5 – If X is possible, then it is necessarily true that X is possible
A fuller version of the modal argument
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If it’s possible for God to exist in one possible world, then it is necessarily true that God exists in all possible worlds
Is the modal ontological argument convincing?
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Denying premise (1) and reversing the modal ontological argument...
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An interesting problem about the arguments to consider...
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Is there any compelling reason to think that it’s impossible for God to exist?