Radio Debate: The Ontological Argument
October 19, 2012
The Ontological Argument
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Ontological Argument. In the eleventh century St Anselm of Canterbury proposed that it was possible to prove the existence of God using reason alone. His argument was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries, but was analysed and improved by later thinkers including Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Other philosophers have been less kind, with the Enlightenment thinker David Hume offering one possible refutation. But the debate continued, fuelled by interventions from such heavyweights as Immanuel Kant and Kurt Gödel; and it remains one of the most discussed problems in philosophy.
With:
John Haldane
Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews
Peter Millican
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford
Clare Carlisle
Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at King’s College London
Suggested further reading:
- Anselm (trans. Thomas Williams), ‘Proslogion with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm’ (Hackett Publishing Co., 2001)Descartes (trans. John Cottingham), ‘Meditations’ (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
- Daniel Dombrowski, ‘Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Response’ (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
- John Haldane, ‘Reasonable Faith’ (Routledge, 2010)
- Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason and Hugh Pyper (eds.), ‘The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought’ (Oxford University Press, 2000), particularly Peter Millican, ‘The Ontological Argument’
- John Hick and Arthur McGill (eds.), ‘The Many-Faced Argument: Recent Studies on the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God’ (Wipf & Stock, 2009)
- Peter Millican, ‘The Devil’s Advocate’, Cogito 3 (1989), pp. 193-207
- Peter Millican, ‘The One Fatal Flaw in Anselm’s Argument’ in Mind 113 (2004), pp. 437-76
- Peter Millican, ‘Ontological Arguments and the Superiority of Existence’ in Mind 116 (2007), pp. 1041-53
- Graham Oppy, ‘Ontological Arguments and Belief in God’ (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
- Alvin Plantinga (ed.), ‘The Ontological Argument’ (Doubleday, 1965)
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