Anselm's Argument: Divine Necessity

✍ Scribed by Brian Leftow

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 332
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Anselm of Canterbury gave the first modal "ontological" argument for God's existence. Yet, despite its distinct originality, philosophers have mostly avoided the question of what modal concepts the argument uses, and whether Anselm's metaphysics entitles him to use them.

Here, Brian Leftow sets out Anselm's modal metaphysics. He argues that Anselm has an "absolute", "broadly logical", or "metaphysical" modal concept, and that his metaphysics provides acceptable truth makers for claims in this modality. He shows that his modal argument is committed (in effect) to
the Brouwer system of modal logic, and defends the claim that Brouwer is part of the logic of "absolute" or "metaphysical" modality. He also defends Anselm's premise that God would exist with absolute necessity against all extant objections, providing new arguments in support of it and ultimately
defending all but one premise of Anselm's best argument for God's existence.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Anselm’s Argument: Divine Necessity
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Introduction
A little history
The present book has historical
Why they matter
Absolute necessity
What I will not discuss
Health warning
The road ahead
1: The Metaphysics
1.1 The metaphysics of necessity
1.2 Anselm on possibility
1.2.1 Types of powers
1.2.2 Actuality and possibility
1.3 Anselmian modal logic
1.4 Proper and improper
1.4.1 Proper, improper, and possibility
1.4.2 Proper, improper, and necessity
1.5 An Anselmian metaphysics for some basic modal truths
1.5.1 Reverse direction
1.5.2 The necessary and the impossible
1.6 Possible worlds
2: The Applications
2.1 The fixity of the past
2.1.1 Is God’s will otiose?
2.1.2 The necessity challenge
2.1.3 Back to the main line
2.1.4 Anselm’s story
2.1.5 God’s reasons
2.2 God’s veracity
2.3 Justice and immortality
2.4 A charity argument
2.5 An indeterminate modal concept?
3: The Problems
3.1 Are some possibilities missing?
3.1.1 The Darkworld argument
3.1.2 History arguments
3.1.3 Bad necessities
3.1.4 Omnipotence
3.1.5 More bad necessities
3.1.6 The will problem
3.2 Problems about divine necessity
3.2.1 Bad necessities
3.2.2 Barnes’ problem
3.2.3 Extrinsic necessities
3.2.4 Direction of explanation
3.2.5 A dilemma
3.2.5.1 If category mistakes are false
3.2.5.2 If category mistakes lack truth-value
3.3 The argument from perfection
4: The Argument
4.1 Anselm’s argument
4.2 The first three premises
4.3 The Meinongian premise
4.4 The missing premise
4.5 The possibility premise
5: Brouwer
5.1 Modal logic and accessibility
5.2 If and only if Brouwer
5.3 An intuition
5.4 Modal difference
5.5 Content and status
5.6 Modal epistemology
6: Hume
6.1 Identity
6.2 Metaphysics
6.3 Supervenience
6.4 Color exclusion
6.5 Conceivability
6.6 Swinburne’s update
7: Kant
7.1 The overall plan
7.1.1 Real vs. nominal definition
7.2 Why propositions?
7.2.1 Kant may have it backwards
7.2.2 An argument against Kant
7.3 Kant’s argument
7.4 Kant’s account of analyticity
7.4.1 Kant’s necessary and sufficient conditions
7.4.2 Further necessary conditions
7.4.3 Idle wheel?
7.4.4 Kant’s definition
7.5 It has to be analytic
7.6 Why analyticity matters
7.6.1 It is not that bad. Really.
7.6.2 And now to (6)
7.6.3 An act of charity
7.6.4 A last go-round
7.6.5 So are there necessary existentials?
7.7 Kant’s dilemma
7.8 The thesis about existence
8: Swinburne
8.1 Modal intuitions
8.2 Hume and Kant redux
8.3 Are there no good arguments?
8.4 Modal metaphysics
8.5 Modal epistemology
8.6 The cosmological argument gambit
9: The Parallel Argument
9.1 Why believe in physically empty worlds?
9.1.1 The question argument
9.1.2 God
9.1.3 Subtraction
9.1.4 A physical necessary being?
9.1.5 Candidates
9.1.6 Against natural powers theories
9.1.7 A confidence argument
9.1.8 Other options
9.2 Arguing the parallel
9.2.1 The argument from sharpenings
9.2.1.1 How to be physical
9.2.1.2 How to be concrete
9.2.1.3 Putting PHYSICS to work
9.2.1.4 Putting ACCOUNT to work
9.2.1.5 Putting VIA NEG to work
9.2.1.6 The “sharpenings” argument concluded
9.2.2 Conceivability
9.2.3 Other considerations
9.2.4 The parallel by parallels
10: Imagining Nothing
10.1 Ordinary sensory imagination
10.2 OSI and evidence for possibility
10.3 No imagining no concreta
10.4 The disappearance story
10.4.1 What is and is not shown
10.4.2 Prompting unreflective belief
10.4.3 Not favored either
10.4.4 Not even an illustration
10.4.5 A reasonable interpretation?
10.4.6 Epistemological consequences
10.4.7 The conjunction counter-argument
10.4.8 A reply
10.4.9 Another reply
10.5 The backdrop
10.5.1 If the backdrop represents empty space
10.5.2 Being concrete and being physical
10.5.3 Concreteness conditions
10.5.4 One moral
10.5.5 A second moral
10.5.6 The backdrop as an absence
10.6 Schrader’s marble
10.7 Mystical imagination?
10.8 Sensory models
11: Thinking of Nothing
11.1 The Way of Necessity
11.1.1 The Way of Entailment
11.1.2 The Way of Brutality
11.1.3 The Way of Limitation
11.2 Combinations
11.3 Similarity to the possible
11.4 Similarity and subtraction
11.5 Conceiving
11.6 Possibilism
11.6.1 Meinong
11.6.2 In-between status
11.6.3 Lewis
11.6.4 Platonism, and the moral
11.7 Modal intuition
12: More Objections
12.1 Findlay
12.2 Findlay generalized
12.3 Uniqueness problems
12.4 Schrader rebooted
12.5 Modality and evil
13: Perfect Being Contingency?
13.1 Impossible
13.2 The Prior option
13.3 What makes possible is in Absent
13.4 Necessary aseity
13.5 The compatibility claim
13.6 Stronger aseity
13.7 Combinatorialism
13.8 Conventionalism
13.8.1 The fictional kind argument
13.9 The modal trilemma
13.9.1 The perfect being, alone and possible
13.9.2 Others’ conventions in an existent future
13.9.3 The rest of the options
13.9.3.1 The “all” option
13.9.3.2 The other options
13.10 The perfect being, alone and not possible
13.11 The perfect being, never alone
13.12 Modal fictionalism
13.13 Cheap truthmaking
13.14 Lower degrees
13.15 Concrete non-existents: possibilism
14: Essence Options
14.1 A simple theory
14.2 Essence as necessary
14.2.1 A “cost” argument
14.2.2 An arbitrariness argument
14.2.3 A “surd” argument
14.3 Two asymmetries
14.4 Essences as constituents
14.5 Essence not a constituent
14.6 Van Inwagen
14.7 No reverse explanation
14.8 A transitivity problem
14.9 A second transitivity problem
14.10 A reply
14.11 A second reply
14.12 Another reply
14.13 The dependence problem
14.14 The general essence variation
14.15 Back to individual essences
14.16 A general essence variation
14.17 Euthyphro-ish
14.18 Explanatory priority
15: Other Non-Concreta
15.1 Explanatory priority and Platonic worlds
15.2 An analogy
15.3 Consider the cases
15.4 The attributes dictate
15.5 Further cases
15.6 The most basic level of reality
15.7 Williamson
16: Contingency Concluded
16.1 Concrete existents
16.2 Other options
16.3 Nothing at all
16.4 Negative existentials
16.5 Razoring truthmakers
16.6 Supervaluation to the rescue?
16.7 Necessity itself?
16.8 And now to (2)
16.9 Intrinsic possibility
16.10 Analytic possibility?
16.11 The moral
17: The Less-Maker Argument
17.1 The Guarantee
17.2 Its possibility
17.3 Guaranteed by nature
17.4 An omnipotence problem
17.5 Perfect beings generally
17.6 A love problem
17.7 Endings
17.8 The upshot
17.9 Missing it all
17.10 Other opinions
17.11 Luck and aseity
17.12 Missed past
17.13 The moral
18: Envoi
Bibliography
Index