Stokes - Philosophy: the great thinkers

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Born at Aosta in Burgundy, Anselm was a pious child and sought admission to the monastic life at the early age of 15. The local abbot, however, refused him on his fathers insistence. After his mothers death, Anselm took to travelling. Eventually he arrived at the Abbey of Bec and began studying under the renowned Prior Lanfranc. He eventually took his monastic orders in 1060. Only three years later, when Lanfranc was appointed Abbot of Caen, the young Anselm succeeded him as prior, much to the chagrin of older and more established candidates for the position. During the next 30 years he wrote his philosophical and theological works and was appointed Abbot of Bec.

Now remembered as the father of the Scholastic tradition and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 until his death, Anselm is of philosophical interest mainly for his logical arguments in two major works, the Monologion (meaning Soliloquy) and the Proslogion (Discourse), both of which gave various arguments intended to prove the existence of God.

By the 12th century, the works of Plato and Aristotle had been rediscovered and reinterpreted by the scholastics who attempted to synthesize early Greek ideas with medieval theology. Following the Greek tradition, it is said that Anselms students had been concerned to hear a rational justification for the existence of God that did not rely merely on the acceptance of scripture or doctrinal teaching. Anselms most famous response to this challenge was to become known as the ontological argument for the existence of God which has been called by some one of the most hotly debated issues in the history of philosophy.

Consider, invites Anselm, that by the term God we mean something than which nothing greater can be thought of. Given that even the non-believer or, as Anselm calls him, the Fool, accepts that this is what the concept of God entails, the existence of God would seem to follow necessarily from the definition. For it would be a contradiction to suppose that God is on the one hand something than which nothing greater can be thought of and on the other hand does not exist. For a God thought of that does not really exist is not so great as one thought of that does exist, and since one can clearly think of God and suppose he exists, then something than which nothing greater can be thought of must be something that exists. God exists because the concept of God exists.

Anselms ontological argument is ingenious in its simplicity. While most people agree that there is something rather fishy about it, opinion has been divided as to exactly what is the matter with the argument. The earliest critic of Anselm was a contemporary Benedictine monk called Gaunilo of Marmoutiers. Gaunilo argued that if Anselms reasoning were correct, then one could conceive of a lost island that was the most perfect island there could ever be. Since by definition the island is the most perfect it must exist, for by Anselms reasoning it would be less than perfect if it did not. Thus, complained Gaunilo, Anselms reasoning licenses the existence of all sorts of imaginary objects and must therefore be faulty. In response, Anselm claimed that the quality of perfection is an attribute that only applies to God, and therefore his ontological argument cannot be used to prove the existence of imaginary islands or anything else.

Versions of Anselms ontological argument were later used by both St Thomas Aquinas and Ren Descartes and were, much later still, heavily criticized by Immanuel Kant. Kants principal complaint was that the concept of God as a perfect being does not necessarily entail that God exists since existence is not a perfection. The concept of a perfect being that exists is no more or less great than the concept of a perfect being that does not exist.

Philosophers agree that the problem with Anselms argument revolves around the fact that we surely cannot ascertain whether something exists or not merely by analysing the meaning of a word or concept. However, exactly what logical error is being committed by attempting to do so has remained a cause of much dispute amongst philosophers and logicians.

The argument was taken up again in more recent times, in the 1960s, when the philosopher Norman Malcolm revived a lesser known variant of Anselms argument which sidesteps the objections made by Kant and others.

According to Malcolm, Anselm argues in the Proslogion that if it is possible that a necessary being could exist, then it must exist, for it would be a contradiction to say a necessary being does not exist. God could only fail to exist if the concept of God was self-contradictory or nonsensical, and this, declares Malcolm, remains to be shown by opponents of the ontological argument.

St Anselm wrote many religious books, including Cur Deus Homo (Why did God become Man?), but is best known today for his two philosophical works, Monologion and Proslogion, in which he attempted to prove the existence of God.

Monologion (1076)

In this book, Anselm argues that the concept of goodness would not be possible if there were not some absolute standard, some ideal of goodness, which all other goodnesses were a reflection of. That ideal of goodness is God.

Proslogion (107778)

Not entirely satisfied with his efforts in Monologion, Anselm tried another proof of God, known as the ontological argument, in his next book: if we can conceive of perfection, but it exists only in our minds, then it is less than perfect. Yet, we can conceive of perfection so therefore perfection, or God, must exist.

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English philosopher of science, Francis Bacon was the forerunner of the famed British school of philosophers that include Locke, Berkeley, Hume, J.S. Mill and Bertrand Russell. Bacons important works include The Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and the Novum Organum. Bacon was also an essayist and enjoyed a successful legal and political career, in particular after James Is succession of Elizabeth, whereupon he was made Lord Chancellor until being found guilty of corruption.

Attributed as the originator of the saying knowledge is power, his importance as a philosopher is most notable with regard to his concern for scientific method. Bacon was troubled by the two schools of thought that had come out of Platonism and Aristotelianism respectively. Firstly, the rationalist view that knowledge could be gained by examining the content and meanings of words a view Bacon dismissed as like spinning a web from the inside of ones own head. Secondly, the Aristotelians, intent on collecting masses of empirical data, were equally useless at helping a man arrive at any scientific hypotheses. What was needed, insisted Bacon, was a new way of collating and organizing data that would help generate inductive hypotheses.

Bacon, like many of his contemporaries and predecessors, had been concerned with the problem of induction, a problem that would later receive an astonishingly sceptical response from Hume. The problem of induction, as Bacons contemporaries saw it, was that the mere repetitive occurrence of an incident does not guarantee that the same thing will happen again. To give a simple example, suppose a man draws nine blue marbles out of a bag of ten. It is no more likely that the tenth marble will be blue than it is that it will be red. The previous instances do not guarantee anything about the following instance.

Bacon saw that the answer to this problem lay in placing the emphasis of investigation on looking for negative instances to disconfirm hypotheses, rather than finding ways of confirming them. This is a striking precursor to Karl