Rethinking Anselm's Arguments

Rethinking Anselm's Arguments PDF Author: Richard Campbell
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004363661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 547

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Book Description
This book re-examines Anselm’s famous arguments for the existence of God in his Proslogion, and in his Reply. It demonstrates how he validly deduces from plausible premises that God so truly exists that He could not be thought not to exist. Most commentators, ancient and modern, wrongly located his argument in a passage which is not about God at all. It becomes evident that, consequently, much contemporary criticism is based on misreading and misunderstanding his text. It reconstructs his reasoning through three distinct but logically connected stages. It shows that, even if Anselm’s crucial premises are sceptically interpreted, his conclusions still follow. Properly understood, this argument is not vulnerable to the standard criticisms, including Gaunilo’s ‘Lost island’ counter-example.

Rethinking Anselm's Arguments

Rethinking Anselm's Arguments PDF Author: Richard Campbell
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004363661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 547

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book re-examines Anselm’s famous arguments for the existence of God in his Proslogion, and in his Reply. It demonstrates how he validly deduces from plausible premises that God so truly exists that He could not be thought not to exist. Most commentators, ancient and modern, wrongly located his argument in a passage which is not about God at all. It becomes evident that, consequently, much contemporary criticism is based on misreading and misunderstanding his text. It reconstructs his reasoning through three distinct but logically connected stages. It shows that, even if Anselm’s crucial premises are sceptically interpreted, his conclusions still follow. Properly understood, this argument is not vulnerable to the standard criticisms, including Gaunilo’s ‘Lost island’ counter-example.

Understanding Anselm's Ontological Argument

Understanding Anselm's Ontological Argument PDF Author: Guy Jackson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031415353
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
Anselm's ontological argument is one of the most fascinating, most controversial, and most misunderstood arguments in the entire history of Western thought. By centring the argument firmly in the Neoplatonic tradition within which Anselm was writing, Understanding Anselm's Ontological Argument sheds fresh light and clarity on this enigmatic piece of philosophy. It argues that, far from resting upon a fallacy or illegitimately attempting to define God into existence, Anselm's argument is a powerful and plausible philosophical proof, and deserves to be taken seriously as such. Written to be understandable for specialists and non-specialists alike, Understanding Anselm's Ontological Argument is ideal for scholars and researchers in philosophy of religion and philosophy in the Middle Ages (especially Neoplatonism) as well as for medievalists in general.

Rethinking the Ontological Argument

Rethinking the Ontological Argument PDF Author: Daniel A. Dombrowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139457144
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Book Description
In recent years, the ontological argument and theistic metaphysics have been criticised by philosophers working in both the analytic and continental traditions. Responses to these criticisms have primarily come from philosophers who make use of the traditional, and problematic, concept of God. In this volume, Daniel A. Dombrowski defends the ontological argument against its contemporary critics, but he does so by using a neoclassical or process concept of God, thereby strengthening the case for a contemporary theistic metaphysics. Relying on the thought of Charles Hartshorne, he builds on Hartshorne's crucial distinction between divine existence and divine actuality, which enables neoclassical defenders of the ontological argument to avoid the familiar criticism that the argument moves illegitimately from an abstract concept to concrete reality. His argument, thus, avoids the problems inherent in the traditional concept of God as static.

The Great Riddle

The Great Riddle PDF Author: Stephen Mulhall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191071617
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Can we talk meaningfully about God? The theological movement known as Grammatical Thomism affirms that religious language is nonsensical, because the reality of God is beyond our capacity for expression. Stephen Mulhall critically evaluates the claims of this movement (as exemplified in the work of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell) to be a legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein's philosophical methods as well as Aquinas's theological project. The major obstacle to this claim is that Grammatical Thomism makes the nonsensicality of religious language when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas 'nonsense' is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in Wittgenstein's work. Mulhall argues that, if Wittgenstein is read in the terms provided by the work of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, then a place can be found in both his early work and his later writings for a more positive role to be assigned to nonsensical utterances—one which depends on exploiting an analogy between religious language and riddles. And once this alignment between Wittgenstein and Aquinas is established, it also allows us to see various ways in which his later work has a perfectionist dimension—in that it overlaps with the concerns of moral perfectionism, and in that it attributes great philosophical significance to what theology and philosophy have traditionally called 'perfections' and 'transcendentals', particularly concepts such as Being, Truth, and Unity or Oneness. This results in a radical reconception of the role of analogous usage in language, and so in the relation between philosophy and theology.

The Word of Truth

The Word of Truth PDF Author: Dale Moody
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802804891
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
Bringing together the insights of several disciplines — biblical theology, modern science, biblical criticism (textual, source, form, redaction), historical theology, and the history of doctrine — Moody develops a systematic theology that is biblically grounded and ecumenically oriented. Thoroughly indexed.

Presupposing God

Presupposing God PDF Author: Robert A. Hand
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666728683
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
It is widely recognized that Immanuel Kant was one of Karl Barth's most important intellectual influences, but how and to what extent this is the case remains an open question. In Presupposing God, Robert Hand demonstrates a deep consistency between Kant's and Barth's theological epistemologies, with this issue in mind. After arguing for a number of positive emphases in Kant's critical philosophy and religious epistemology in conversation with modern Kant scholarship, Presupposing God demonstrates how these emphases were obscured in Kant's reception in the decades between Kant and Barth, and then explores the intellectual conditions under which Barth first encountered Kant. The argument proceeds to show how Barth wrestled with these varying interpretations and continued to utilize Kant with increased sophistication as his thought developed across the Romans commentaries, Anselm, and the Church Dogmatics. Presupposing God suggests that Kant can be an asset to theology, rather than the liability he is often taken to be, and that Barth is one of the better available examples of this in practice.

Fifty Years of Philosophy of Religion: A Select Bibliography (1955-2005)

Fifty Years of Philosophy of Religion: A Select Bibliography (1955-2005) PDF Author: Andy Sanders
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047420810
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 660

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Book Description
The bibliography lists about 10.000 titles of monographs, collections and articles in the field of the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology that appeared between 1955 and 2005. The majority of them are in the English language but publications in German, Dutch and French are listed as well. Though it is not claimed to be exhaustive, the bibliography offers a fairly representative survey of scholarly work on the main topics of interest. *** Publications have been systematically classified according to eleven main categories: Introductions, Surveys and Historical Issues (Part I), Religious Language (Part II), Religious Experience (Part III), Religious Epistemology (Part IV) , Theism (Part V), Hermeneutics (Part VI), Religion and Science (Part VII), Religion and Aesthetics (Part VIII), Religion and Morality (Part IX), Religious Pluralism (Part X) and Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Part XI). Part III has been subdivided into Religious Experience and Mystical Experience, Part VII into The Concept of God, (arguments for) The Existence of God, The Problem of Evil and Atheism, and Part VII into General and Historical Issues, Theological Issues and (implications of) Modern Physics, Cosmology and Biology. *** The bibliography will particularly be useful to scholars, teachers and students in the philosophy of religion, philosophical theology and systematic theology as well as to those who are interested, professionally or otherwise, in the results of academic scholarship in those fields.

The Idea of the Vernacular

The Idea of the Vernacular PDF Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271017587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
This pioneering anthology of Middle English prologues and other excerpts from texts written between 1280 and 1520 is one of the largest collections of vernacular literary theory from the Middle Ages yet published and the first to focus attention on English literary theory before the sixteenth century. It edits, introduces, and glosses some sixty excerpts, all of which reflect on the problems and opportunities associated with writing in the &"mother tongue&" during a period of revolutionary change for the English language. The excerpts fall into three groups, illustrating the strategies used by medieval writers to establish their cultural authority, the ways they constructed audiences and readerships, and the models they offered for the process of reading. Taken together, the excerpts show how vernacular texts reflected and contributed to the formation of class, gender, professional, and national identity. They open windows onto late medieval debates on women's and popular literacy, on the use of the vernacular for religious instruction or Bible translation, on the complex metaphorical associations contained within the idea of the vernacular, and on the cultural and political role of the &"courtly&" writing associated with Chaucer and his successors. Besides the excerpts, the book contains five essays that propose new definitions of medieval literary theory, discuss the politics of Middle English writing, the relation of medieval book production to notions of authorship, and the status of the prologue as a genre, and compare the role of the medieval vernacular to that of postcolonial literatures. The book includes a substantial glossary that constitutes the first mapping of the language and terms of Middle English literary theory. The Idea of the Vernacular will be an invaluable asset not only to Middle English survey courses but to courses in English literary and cultural history and courses on the history of literary theory.

Signs and Wonders

Signs and Wonders PDF Author: Benedicta Ward
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040242723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book is concerned with the concepts of Christian holiness and spirituality, from Late Antiquity through to the Middle Ages. The first group of articles focuses on the Desert Fathers, the following ones examine key figures in the monastic history of the medieval West, dealing above all with England and with Bede and Anselm of Canterbury. Throughout, Benedicta Ward's aim has been to find an approach that makes full sense of Christian writings, notably the hagiography, miracles and all. This should not be seen, she argues, simply as biography, nor as a quarry for information on social history, valuable though it may be for those purposes. The primary object of these Lives - as of the people about whom they were written - was religious; to neglect this meaning is to risk fundamentally misunderstanding these texts. Ce volume traite des concepts de la sainteté et de la spiritualité chrétiennes, de l’Antiquité tardive jusqu’au Moyen Age. Le premier groupe d’études se concentre sur les Pères du Désert, les suivants font l’examen de personnages-clefs dans l’histoire monastique de l’Occident médiéval, s’attachant avant tout à l’Angleterre et à Bède et Anselme de Cantorbéry. Benedicta Ward à pour propos constant de trouver une approche rendent tout son sens à la litterature chrétienne et notamment à la littérature hagiographique, miracles et autres. Bien que valable à ces deux niveaux, ceci ne devrait pas être perçu, souligne-t’elle, en tant que simple biographie, ni en tant que source d’information sur l’histoire sociale. L’objet premier de ces Vies est d’ordre religieux; toute négligence de ce sens peut mener à une mécompréhension fondamentale de ces textes.

The Mirror of Language (Revised Edition)

The Mirror of Language (Revised Edition) PDF Author: Marcia L. Colish
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803264472
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Early Christianity faced the problem of the human word versus Christ the Word. Could language accurately describe spiritual reality? The Mirror of Language brilliantly traces the development of one prominent theory of signs from Augustine through Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. Their shared epistemology validated human language as an authentic but limited index of preexistent reality, both material and spiritual. This sign theory could thereby account for the ways men receive, know, and transmit religious knowledge, always mediated through faith. Marcia L. Colish demonstrates how the three theologians used different branches of the medieval trivium to express a common sign theory: Augustine stressed rhetoric, Anselm shifted to grammar (including grammatical proofs of God's existence), and Thomas Aquinas stressed dialectic. Dante, the one poet included in this study, used the Augustinian sign theory to develop a Christian poetics that culminates in the Divine Comedy. The author points out not only the commonality but also the sharp contrasts between these writers and shows the relation between their sign theories and the intellectual ferment of the times. When first published in 1968, The Mirror of Language was recognized as a pathfinding study. This completely revised edition incorporates the scholarship of the intervening years and reflects the refinements of the author's thought. Greater prominence is given to the role of Stoicism, and sharper attention is paid to some of the thinkers and movements surrounding the major thinkers treated. Concerns of semiotics, philosophy, and literary criticism are elucidated further. The original thesis, still controversial, is now even wider ranging and more salient to current intellectual debate.