Anselm and Russell

Anselm and Actuality

Philosophy abounds in troublesome modal arguments-endlessly debated, perennially plausible, perennially suspect. The standards of validity for modal reasoning have long been unclear; they become clear only when we provide a semantic analysis of modal logic by reference to possible worlds and to possible things therein.2 Thus insofar as we understand modal reasoning at all, we understand it as d...

Arguments for God’s Existence: Anselm and Aquinas

Imagine a God0 that had every attribute that a God1 has (omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, etc.) except existence. By premise two, having existence is better than not having it. So only God1, not God0, could be God according to Anselm’s definition. Several philosophers, including Descartes (1596–1650), followed Anselm in putting forth a variation of the argument. A contemporary of Anse...

Russell and Logical Ontology

Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein

Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein were founders (although not by any means the sole founders) of the analytic tradition in philosophy; but they did not found the philosophy of language, which has roots stretching back much further. Their principal contribution, indeed, could be regarded as being in the opposite direction: it is not so much that they applied philosophical methods to the study of l...

St. Anselm and the Logical Syntax of Agency

In a fascinating fragment, Lambeth Manuscript 59, St. Anselm of Canterbury has bequeathed to us the foundations of a logical syntax of agency utilizing the strikingly modern-seeming device of treating agency as a statement operator. This approach, whereby the syntax of agency becomes similar to that of the negation operator in classical sentence logic, is currently a subject of considerable int...