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Reading group: Anselm’s Proslogion 2–4, with Gaunilo’s reply and Anselm’s answer

Aoife Brennan Fellow
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God & the argumentsMedieval ChristianScholasticismAlvin PlantingaAnselmImmanuel Kant#gaunilo#ontological-argument#proslogion#reading-group
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I am a philosophy and theology student and I have heard the ontological argument "refuted" in three different modules without ever reading it properly. Proposal: we read it slowly, together with the objection that came immediately and Anselm's own answer to it. It's short, so we can go line by line.

Texts: Proslogion chapters 2–4; Gaunilo's "On Behalf of the Fool"; Anselm's Reply. Thomas Williams's Hackett translation is clear and cheap, but any will do.

Plan:

  • Week 1: Proslogion 2, "that than which nothing greater can be thought" and the fool of the Psalm who says in his heart there is no God.
  • Week 2: Proslogion 3 (God cannot even be thought not to exist) and 4 (how the fool could say what cannot be thought).
  • Week 3: Gaunilo's lost island and Anselm's Reply.
  • Week 4: the long afterlife: Aquinas, Kant on existence not being a real predicate, and Plantinga's modal version.

One thing I'd like us to notice: the Proslogion is written as a prayer. Its original title was "faith seeking understanding". I want to know whether that changes what the argument is for.

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6 replies

  1. Siobhán Keane

    Contributor

    Week 1. What struck me is the opening chapter, which most anthologies cut. Anselm asks God to let him understand what he already believes. So the argument is not addressed to the fool in order to convert him. The fool is a character in the argument, the person who understands the words and still denies. That changes how I read the "refutations": many of them treat it as a sales pitch, which it isn't.

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  2. Tomasz Wójcik

    Fellow

    Week 2. Chapter 3 is a different argument, and the one philosophers have mostly cared about since the 1960s. Chapter 2 says: a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the understanding. Chapter 3 says: a being that cannot be thought not to exist is greater than one that can. That's a modal claim, and it's the ancestor of Plantinga's version in The Nature of Necessity: if it's possible that a maximally great being exists, then one does. The whole weight then falls on "possible", which is where critics push.

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  3. Nikos Stavridis

    Fellow

    Week 3. Gaunilo's island is wonderful and Anselm's reply is underrated. Anselm insists the argument applies only to "that than which nothing greater can be thought", not to "the greatest island". An island has no intrinsic maximum; any island you think of can be exceeded in thought by one with one more palm tree. (That way of putting it is Plantinga's, but it is in the spirit of Anselm's reply.) Whether that reply works depends on whether "greatest possible being" has a coherent maximum. The Orthodox tradition I teach would add that God's essence is beyond our concepts entirely, so neither the argument nor the objection reaches it.

  4. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    Week 3, a Jewish reader's note. Maimonides would have been very uneasy with Anselm's starting point. For him, saying anything positive about God's essence, even "greatest", risks idolatry of a concept. You can see how negative theology and the ontological argument come from opposite instincts about what the mind can do with God's name.

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  5. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    Week 4, from the sceptic in the room. Kant's line that existence is not a real predicate has always seemed to me decisive against chapter 2: saying a thing exists adds nothing to the concept of it, only posits it. Chapter 3 is harder to dismiss, I admit, because necessary existence might be a real property in a way plain existence isn't. Then I go with Gaunilo's spirit: if the modal argument works for a maximally great being, an equally good one seems to work for its absence.

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  6. Aoife Brennan

    Fellow

    Thank you, everyone. My conclusion: Proslogion 2 probably does fall to Kant, and Aquinas already thought it failed for different reasons. Proslogion 3 is a live argument whose weak point is the premise that God's existence is possible in the strong sense. And the prayer frame matters: it was never meant to compel the fool, only to show the believer that what she believes is not unthinkable. That is a smaller claim, and perhaps a more defensible one.

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