BASA

TWO «NEW» CRITIQUES OF THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT by PAUL A. STREVELER (West Chester State College, Pa., USA) By any purely chronological estimate, Anselm of Canterbury should be at least as dead as Hildebert of Lavardin, 1 but his name lives on as the author of what doubtless, must be the single most commented upon argument in all of christian philosophy– perhaps, indeed, of all western philosophy. Critiques of Anselm's ontological argument, although frequently and vigorously voiced, have, through the history of thought, become needlessly repititious, and tiresomely commonplace. Any college sophomore with a pinch of philosophie pedantry can recite the gist of Gaunilon's riposte that you can't argue from the ideal to the real, and show the « absurdity » of Anselm's reasoning by repeating the bit about the idea of the most perfect island. Since the days of Kant it bas become almost a philosophical cliche to retort: « Existence isn't a predicate or perfection of anything » or, to put the Kantian slogan in more modern dress: « All statements of existence are synthetic ». Thus, all talk about necessary existence is supposed to be nonsense. 2 The labyrinth of literature exposing the alledged fallacies of Anselm's reasoning seems to be variations on these themes-variations that are becoming quite uninteresting, to say the least. We need only look back upon the history of medieval philosophy to become immediately aware that it was not only Gaunilon who saw reason to criticise Anselm's famous argument. I would like to examine here, in a rather sketchy manner, two medieval critiques of Anselm's argument which, to my mind, are quite unique and which, in many ways, far surpass in cogency and relevancy the common criticisms found in textbooks. The first I gather from 1 Hildebert of Lavardin actually died twenty-four years (1133) after Anselm (1109).Windelband (History of Philosophy, Vol. I) reports that Hildebert was one of the anti-dialecticians of the day, a pious bishop of Tours from 1057-1133. 2 J. J. C. Smart's much anthologised article, «The Existence of God », contains the substance of the traditional criticisms.