This paper considers Anselm’s Proslogion argument against a background of historical events that include philosophical disputes between Christian and Jewish polemicists. I argue that the Proslogion argument was addressed, in part, to non-Christian theists and that it offered a response to Jewish polemicists who had argued that the Christian conception of God as an instantiated unity was irrational. Anselm is not trying to convince atheists that there really is a God. He is arguing that the Christian conception of God is (...) logically coherent. (shrink)

In this article I examine the modal theism of St. Anselm of Canterbury, arguing that the person of the divine Son plays an important role in how Anselm thinks about God’s power and possibilities. Beginning with his first major theological work, the Monologion, I show how Anselm’s characterizes God’s knowledge of creation, not in the traditional, Augustinian terms of an intellectual divine “idea,” but in the comparatively more linguistic terms of a divine “locutio” or “utterance.” I go on to argue (...) that this sets Anselm up for a somewhat unique modal theology, one in which God is best understood as acting and creating, not against the backdrop of an already defined and existing domain of possibilities, but in a way that makes him the inventor and creator of his own possibilities. In the second part of the article, I turn to Anselm’s influential work of Christology, Cur Deus Homo, to examine how his “theistic actualism” is paralleled in select aspects of his account of the divine Son’s Incarnation in the person and work of Jesus Christ. (shrink)

La cuestión de ‘Por qué hay alguien más bien que nadie?’ obliga a retomar la que indaga por qué hay algo y no más bien nada, que debemos a Leibniz y que implica su principio de razón suficiente, la completa determinación y la confianza que ello provee. 1) Perseguiremos esa implicación con cierto detalle hasta lograr la dimensión que Leibniz le otorga aalguien y sus propiedades en su sistema. 2) Mediante una sucinta consideración histórica a partir del contraste de Descartes (...) con el trasfondo neoplatónico, y un recuento de la reacción de Spinoza frente a su predecesor, intentaré ilustrar la postura de Leibniz respecto de la pregunta que nos orienta. 3) Pero la pregunta es pertinente todavía hoy frente a posturas que apostarían a que más bien >nadie que alguien, tales como el naturalismo o el nihilismo, 4) para lo cual finalmente valoraremos cuánto nos ayuda Leibniz, y qué tanto hemos de apartarnos de él, o de una tradicional interpretación de su concepto de razón. (shrink)