P401/P515 Fall 2010: History of Philosophy: Special Topics Anselm of Canterbury Lecture Notes Paul Vincent Spade “Philosophy P401/P515: History of Philosophy: Special Topics. Anselm of Canturbury: Lecture Notes, Fall, 2010,” by Paul Vincent Spade is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Table of Contents Preliminaries ............................................................................................................................................. 1 Mechanics of the Course .......................................................................................................................... 2 Requirements ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Submitting written work ........................................................................................................................ 4 Reserves ................................................................................................................................................. 4 Reading ...................................................................................................................................................... 4 Anselm’s Life ............................................................................................................................................. 4 Background ............................................................................................................................................... 8 Anselm on Faith and Reason ................................................................................................................. 10 Anselm: The Monologion Arguments for the Existence and Nature of God ....................15 The arguments in Chapter 1 .................................................................................................................. 17 The first argument ................................................................................................................................ 18 The second argument ........................................................................................................................... 19 The convergence of the two strands of argument ................................................................................ 19 How to avoid the “Third Man” ............................................................................................................ 20 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................................. 20 The argument in Chapter 3.................................................................................................................... 21 The argument proper ............................................................................................................................ 24 Comments on the argument ................................................................................................................. 26 Chapters 5–8 ........................................................................................................................................... 27 Chapters 9–12 ......................................................................................................................................... 30 Chapters 13–14 ....................................................................................................................................... 32 Chapters 15–16 ....................................................................................................................................... 33 Chap. 17 ................................................................................................................................................... 38 Chaps. 18–22 ........................................................................................................................................... 38 Chapter 18 ............................................................................................................................................ 40 Chapter 19 ............................................................................................................................................ 42 Chapter 20 ............................................................................................................................................ 42 Chapter 21 ............................................................................................................................................ 44 Chapter 22 ............................................................................................................................................ 45 Remarks on the argument .................................................................................................................... 46 The Proslogion...................................................................................................................49 Roadmap of the Proslogion .................................................................................................................... 51 The Ontological Argument .................................................................................................................... 52 Something Than Which Nothing Greater Can Be Thought ................................................................. 53 Preliminaries ........................................................................................................................................ 54 Different versions of the ontological argument .................................................................................... 56 The Fool ............................................................................................................................................... 57 The Proof Itself .................................................................................................................................... 58 Existence in the understanding ............................................................................................................ 60 Greatness .............................................................................................................................................. 61 Existence in reality ............................................................................................................................... 62 What’s wrong with the argument? ....................................................................................................... 64 Four senses of ‘greater than’ ................................................................................................................ 64 The ambiguity in the argument ............................................................................................................ 66 The argument in Proslogion 3 ............................................................................................................. 68 A major problem .................................................................................................................................. 69 Gaunilo’s “Lost Island” objection ........................................................................................................ 70 Remarks on Anselm’s Reply to Gaunilo .............................................................................................. 72 Anselm on Truth ................................................................................................................77 The Correspondence Theory of Truth .................................................................................................. 78 Background ............................................................................................................................................. 80 The Truth of Statements ........................................................................................................................ 80 Truth in Other Contexts ........................................................................................................................ 85 The Supreme Truth ................................................................................................................................ 91 Loose Ends in On Truth ......................................................................................................................... 93 Justice ...................................................................................................................................................... 94 Anselm on Free Choice ......................................................................................................94 The Visser/Williams Paper in Companion, “Anselm’s Account of Freedom” ............................... 100 On the Fall of the Devil ...................................................................................................101 One Classical Picture ............................................................................................................................ 101 Other Views ........................................................................................................................................... 102 The Theory of the Two Wills ..............................................................................................................