Cover of GREATER THAN CAN BE THOUGHT: ANSELM OF CANTERBURY AND THE MOST PERSISTENT PROOF OF GOD

GREATER THAN CAN BE THOUGHT: ANSELM OF CANTERBURY AND THE MOST PERSISTENT PROOF OF GOD

 Sample

Get 30 days of Standard free

€5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for €0.00
More purchase options

GREATER THAN CAN BE THOUGHT: ANSELM OF CANTERBURY AND THE MOST PERSISTENT PROOF OF GOD

By: Boris Kriger
Narrated by: Daniel Nathan Wallace
Try for €0.00

€5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for €12.77

Buy Now for €12.77

Season's Savings | 0.99 €/month for 3 months

5.99 €/month thereafter - terms apply. Cancel monthly.
This book tells the story of that argument and of the man who found it. Anselm of Canterbury was a runaway son from the Alps who became the most beloved teacher of his age, a monk dragged weeping to an archbishopric he did not want, an exile who stood against two kings of England, and the thinker who did something no theologian before him had dared: he stated, in a single phrase, exactly what he meant by the word God — that than which nothing greater can be thought — and then refused to move that definition by a single inch while he proved that what it names must exist.For nine centuries the proof has been declared dead. Gaunilo answered it within Anselm’s lifetime; Thomas Aquinas set it aside; Kant announced that existence is not a predicate; the logical positivists dismissed it as grammar gone wrong. And each time, the argument returned — in Descartes and Leibniz, in Hegel, in the modal reconstructions of Malcolm and Hartshorne, in a notebook of Kurt Gödel, in the possible-worlds logic of Alvin Plantinga. No other argument in the history of thought has been refuted so often and buried so shallowly.Boris Kriger argues that the reason is simple and has been hiding in plain sight: Anselm did what almost no one arguing about God has done before or since. He accepted formal responsibility for his words. He declared his definition before he began, and everything he claimed, he claimed strictly within it. The nine-hundred-year quarrel over the ontological argument, this book shows, has never really been a quarrel about the reasoning — the reasoning is sound. It is a quarrel about the definition: whether such a concept is admissible, what may be built into it, and what follows once it is granted. Read this way, the famous refutations change character. Kant did not break the proof; he disputed the definition.©2026 Boris Kriger (P)2026 Boris Kriger
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet