The Modal Unity of Anselm's Proslogion

Faith and Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 1, January 1996, 50-67.

Gary Mar <gmar@ccmail.sunysb.edu>
Department of Philosophy
SUNY at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794-3750 USA
       Anselm's prayerful meditation on the meaning of faith in the Proslogion was an attempt to find "one single argument ... that by itself would suffice to prove that God really exists, that He is the supreme good needing no other and is He whom all things have need of for their being and well-being, and also to prove whatever we believe about the Divine Being.  Most contemporary philosophers, however, have narrowly focused on Proslogion II , and have consequently ignored Anselm's emphasis on a single argument in his work.ii In this paper I attempt to provide a logical map of Anselm's argument as a whole. I will not dwell on the assumptions about existence and predication in Proslogion II, nor will I defend the soundness or cogency of that argument. Instead, I shall attempt to exhibit the logical relations among the stages of Anselm's broader "single argument" as it is progressively developed in Proslogion I, II, III and the remaining chapters of the Proslogion , and as it is elaborated upon in Anselm's Reply to Gaunilo.

     I will show that these multiple passages reflect a single logically unified modal argument, a multi-faceted argument that reflects the beauty of a single gem. Anselm's claim of a single argument is vindicated by showing that the conclusions of the various subsidiary arguments serve as the premises of a more comprehensive, unified, and sustained argument. Many philosophers have misconstrued Anselm's project as one of conjuring the existence of God from the definition of God as a perfect being. My view, in contrast, is that Anselm was not trying to "define" God into existence but rather he was constructing, through the eyes of faith, a theology of God conceived of as a perfect being. A logically elegant result of our reconstruction is that the facets of Anselm's argument are validated by standard modal axioms drawn from contemporary modal logic.


Index of Sections:

References

i Preface to the Proslogion, lines' 7-12, quoted from St. Anselm's Proslogion, translated with an introduction and philosophical commentary by M. J. Charlesworth (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), p. 103.

ii The philosophical tradition deriving from Kant focuses on the doctrines of existence and predication in Proslogion II. The modal tradition beginning with Norman Malcolm's [ "Anselm's Ontological Arguments," Philosophical Review, 69 (1960)] observation that Proslogion III contains an argument for God's necessary existence. Robert M. Adams [ "The Logical Structure of Anselm's Arguments," The Philosophical Review, vol. LXXX, no. 1 (Jan.) 1971, pp. 28-54, which is reprinted in Robert M. Adams The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)] discerned a valid modal argument in Chapter I of Anselm's Reply to Gaunilo, and Alvin Plantinga [The Nature of Necessity (New York: Oxford University Press (1974)] went on to propose his own version of a modal ontological argument which would be validated within (S5). Returning to an earlier tradition, Paul Oppenheimer and Edward Zalta [ "On the Logic of the Ontological Argument," in James Tomberlin , ed., Philosophical Perspectives, 5, Philosophy of Religion (Atascadero, California: Ridgeview (1991), pp. 509-529] in their exposition of Proslogion II claim that the argument turns on the logic of definite descriptions and does not contain any essential modal inferences. They attempt to validate the argument using a free logic in which definite descriptions need not denote. In contrast, the work here tries to map out Anselm's entire meditation as a 'single argument.'