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Anselm of Canterbury gave the first "ontological" argument for God's existence as necessary. Yet philosophers have mostly neglected to examine what modal concepts he uses, and what their metaphysical basis is. Brian Leftow sets out Anselm's modal metaphysics, and defends all but one premise of Anselm's best argument for God's existence.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: The Metaphysics
- 2: The Applications
- 3: The Problems
- 4: The Argument
- 5: Brouwer
- 6: Hume
- 7: Kant
- 8: Swinburne
- 9: The Parallel Argument
- 10: Imagining Nothing
- 11: Thinking of Nothing
- 12: Five More Objections
- 13: Perfect Being Contingency?
- 14: Essence Options
- 15: Other Non-Concreta
- 16: Contingency Concluded
- 17: The Less-Maker Argument
- 18: Envoi
About the author
Brian Leftow is the William P. Alston Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Rutgers University and an Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He was previously the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford.
Summary
Anselm of Canterbury gave the first modal "ontological" argument for God's existence. Yet, despite its distinct originality, philosophers have mostly avoided the question of what modal concepts the argument uses, and whether Anselm's metaphysics entitles him to use them.
Here, Brian Leftow sets out Anselm's modal metaphysics. He argues that Anselm has an "absolute", "broadly logical", or "metaphysical" modal concept, and that his metaphysics provides acceptable truth makers for claims in this modality. He shows that his modal argument is committed (in effect) to the Brouwer system of modal logic, and defends the claim that Brouwer is part of the logic of "absolute" or "metaphysical" modality. He also defends Anselm's premise that God would exist with absolute necessity against all extant objections, providing new arguments in support of it and ultimately defending all but one premise of Anselm's best argument for God's existence.
Additional text
a detailed and robustly defended Anselmian account of perfect being necessity against challenges that have emerged in the history of philosophy after St Anselm
