Adrianna asked:

What are Anselm’s aims in the ontological argument?

What definition of God does Anselm’s argument depend on?

Answer by Tony Fahey

Anselm’s argument for the existence of god is called the ontological argument, and can be found in chapters two and three of his Proslogion. Very roughly, his argument, or definition, goes like this: god is the most perfect being; it is more perfect to exist than not to exist; therefore god exists. It should be said that Anselm was a monk and bishop of Canterbury who held that faith is prior to and provides the context for understanding. Thus, for Anselm, it is not the case that we understand first in order to believe, rather it is that we believe in order to understand. According to Anselm, if God is defined as a being than which nothing greater can be conceived or thought, then God must exist, since it is greater to exist in reality than just in the mind as notional or conceptual

One of the earliest critics of Anselm’s ontological proof was his contemporary Gaunilo (also a monk), who, in his Liber pro Insipiente, opposed it on the grounds that humans cannot pass from intellect to reality. According to Gaunilo, Anselm’s argument would imply that anything, no matter how fictitious or chimerical, which was thought in the mind, would have to exist in reality. To prove his point Gaunilo uses the example of an ‘island more blessed than any other, a perfect island… greater than which nothing greater can be conceived’. Given Anselm’s ‘proof’, he argues, if one can conceive of such an island in this way, then it follows that such an island must exist in reality as well as in the mind – this, of course is absurd. In his defence, Anselm claimed that his argument applied exclusively to God.

Renee asked:

Why does science tend to be materialistic in its metaphysical assumptions?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

Science is not philosophy and science has no metaphysical assumptions. Science studies the physical world and tries to devise the most powerful theories possible to explain the physical world. However these theories must be fully supported and tested by the experimental evidence.

Science studies the physical material world, that is all. Science has no philosophy, it makes no metaphysical assumptions. However some scientists may stray over the the line between philosophy and science and they may try to persuade us that science favours a particular set of metaphysical beliefs. They are wrong. Science can never lead us to metaphysical conclusions.

Tom asked:

I was wondering, Why do people have ‘crushes’ on other people. If you like someone, why do most people not just ask them out? if they say yes, score one, and if they say no, it’s no big deal at all! they’ll move on. it’s win win, so why do they fear rejection to the point where they don’t tell anyone, and keep it a secret.

PS: I’m not FULLY sure what philosophy is, so I really hope this is a philosophy question.

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

You are right with wondering whether this is really a psychological rather than a philosophical question. It is not philosophical in the least. But it’s about human beings; and if Socrates was around, he would answer you and help you. So I will try to illuminate this issue for you.

Almost everyone develops a crush sometime or another. A crush can be very hurtful if its not reciprocated by the other person, but this is part of growing up. Of course it would be better if we could all of us open up and talk freely. But unfortunately, it is not always possible. This is because guilt plays a major role in the individual’s development. And once we have grown up, this feeling of guilt–the inner voice, or guilty conscience–prevents us talking about our crushes to anyone.

We feel embarrassed to confess to friends, and fear that we might hurt or be disrespectful to the person on whom we have a crush. But the real crux of the matter is being scared of rejection. It is difficult to go up to a person, without knowing them well and just ask for a date. If you know the person well, then perhaps it is a little easier (of course you can still make a mistake!). The point is that most people are shy; and fear of rejection is a huge problem for them.

There are instances (quite a few) when rejection provokes an identity crisis and hurts the ego. In some cases, a damaged ego can leave a person deflated for a long time, sometimes forever! Such people can develop an abiding and often escalating sense of inferiority. Once this emotional confusion begins, such a person becomes reluctant to mix with others. Ultimately this fear of taking a false step (and not knowing what the other person thinks of them) is what holds people back from expressing themselves to the person they have a crush on.

Society is structured in a way that no-one can escape being saddled with such psychological problems–e.g. we all carry the burden of our childhood on our back, when we were most sensitive to criticism and rejection; and many people carry this burden through life without ever being aware of it. Also, there are introverted and extroverted people, and the latter tend on the whole to have more resources to shake it off. These people find it easier to open up; they are not as timid, not as self-consciously hooked etc. Others just cannot function that way. We cannot force anyone to communicate if they are not ready inside themselves to do so.

By the same token, it is impossible to stop a human being’s imagination. People can have a crush on a person, or on music or books or games or in fact anything. Many hobbies develop into passions, although that’s not quite the same thing. Crushes are different: they can fizzle out quite naturally if the subject is diverted. Of course they can also turn the opposite way, namely what we call ‘unrequited love’, which tends to get stronger and to thrive on fantasy.

Psychologists frequently study such people in their practice who have crush fantasies and the assumption is usually that it relates to their personal past experiences. It can be anything from the memory of mother, father and other past relationships at a sub-conscious level. Perhaps the person is not aware of their feelings and don’t know how to express them.

So, to have a crush is effectively to live in the clouds in a dream world. Once this wears off, and reality strikes, it’s often hard to cope with life, which suddenly looks much greyer. But all rosy dreams have to be abandoned some day. Then the same people might look for something else for stimulation. I call it the surrogate stimulus object: you focus (for a time) on something else that gives you equal satisfaction, until it becomes part of the furniture, or else until it is safe to return to your first crush, or until you have actually succeeded in forgetting about the crush.

To end: none of this is in essence philosophical. There are no concepts here; no logical inferences etc. Neither of these can help anyone who has the problem you asked about. However, philosophy has not always been so aloof from the life we have to live. For example, Plato in his Dialogues frequently talks about passions, desires and crushes (although he doesn’t use the word). But don’t read him expecting to find prescriptions on how to date another person.

If you want to do some reading on this issue, I suggest Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development by Erik Erikson. He is a psychologist well-known for his theory on the social development of human beings. And I would be very surprised if you didn’t learn a lot about ego, identity, guilt, fear, insecurity etc. that are just not common knowledge – as they really should be!

Brett asked:

Socrates thinks that the moral truth is personal. What does he mean by that, and how do we arrive at that truth?

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

The way Socrates arrived at the moral truth was by a conversational method which we call dialectics. In other words he asked questions of his conversation partner such as: ‘What is virtue’? When his partner answers, he would then ask another question about the answer. Then he would ask more questions, and very often at the end of the dialogue the other fellow was forced to admit that he did not know the answer to the first question. He merely assumed he did, or took the conventional point of view. Socrates invented this kind of dialectic, which is why it is called the Socratic method.

By itself this questions and answer game would not lead anywhere. One of the reasons the Athenians disliked Socrates so much is because he was showing up their ignorance. In reality there is a truth finding method right in front of their nose. It consist of this: Socrates will usually draw on examples from different ways of life. For example, let’s say we want to know what is good. Socrates would ask, if a ship’s captain runs his ship on to a beach and causes lots of damage, is that good or bad? If a cobbler makes my shoes too small is that good or bad? If a baker leaves dead flies in the bread is that good or bad? Each of these people know their responsibilities perfectly well and therefore what is good or bad practice in their profession. Because of this, Socrates adopted the point of view that knowing what is good will lead to these people doing the right thing. So in this limited sense they have knowledge of the good. Now you can continue this list of examples across the whole of society. In every situation people know what is good and behave accordingly.

The trouble is too often they don’t. In those cases, Socrates would say they are driven by motives of doing good for themselves but end up doing bad things for everyone else. Socrates would say, this is based in a confusion about what is good for them. Therefore any behavior that is not good actually reveals that person’s confusion, which is ignorance. You can see the drift of it, which is that you will quickly make an inference from all those cases that it is better to do good than do bad. We call this inference from induction. Usually induction deals with particular examples which all add up to some common feature. In this case Socrates would make the point that it is always better to do good than bad.

From this basis Socrates came to understand that people who do bad things cannot have made this kind of inference and therefore they are ignorant. So the important thing is to draw their attention to it and show them that this is the way to acquire knowledge.

And this is how he established the dialectical method in order to educate Athenians, for the purpose of their self-development and truthfulness.

However, Socrates did not think he knew the answers to all questions. But he saw that no-one else knew them either and so his questions where open to debate for all people. Socrates persisted with his questioning in the market place and the street because he wanted to jolt the Athenians into examining themselves and their lives. Socrates maintained that to live an examined life is a good life because it is in accordance with virtues.

In effect Socrates was the founder of moral philosophy. Except he wanted to give this philosophy to the people to become good citizens.

Socrates believed that if an individual has good moral standards, he would then put it into practice and be a good citizen. What he means by this is that once we discover these moral virtues we can put them to good use and perform actions for the benefit of all society.

The conclusion of all this is that moral truth is not an abstract concept, not something for philosophers to debate in a social vacuum. Moral truth is personal, because it affects society for good and for ill. Most importantly moral truth is carried into society by every individual. So if a society wishes to be a moral institution, it can only be so if every citizen is aware of and acts on their knowledge of the moral good.

Laura asked:

Can our feelings be our sole guide to morality?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

No they can’t. Just as you can’t decide what a word should mean (the meaning of a word is decided by all the speakers of a language who use that word), so you can’t decide on your own if something is right or wrong. You are part of a moral community and all the members of that community take part part in the forming of moral decisions. When you decide that something is morally right you are also deciding that it is right for all other members of the moral community. Morality is the highest and most difficult of human activities and moral decisions are the most important decisions we make.

You do not have to agree with the moral beliefs of other people but you must take their moral beliefs into account when forming your own moral beliefs. Remember morality is about how we act towards other people and how we expect them to act towards us.

Ann asked:

What did Plato mean when he said that because the mind can think about immaterial objects it must be immaterial? Is this assumption true?

Do definitions of philosophy assume that humans have certain abilities? Do they assume that we can understand ourselves and the universe?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Ask yourself: if the mind was a physical thing, how could it discern something immaterial (e.g. love, justice, beauty, God)? None of these can be touched, seen, heard or tasted, and therefore they would be inaccessible to such a mind. Further such a mind would only be able to process factual information and relay them to experience, and from there to language. But metaphysical states (like being in love, having a religious ecstasy) cannot be experienced, for the same reason again that our senses (or instruments) don’t participate and/or discern. In that sense, Plato’s proposition is undoubtedly true.

As for Descartes, the idea is obviously the same, even though it is couched in different words. Consider yourself sensing a physical object: Now your mind, in order to perceive this object, must pick up something from it which is not material, i.e. colour (we call this the phenomenon of the object). If you cannot do this, then there is no such object. And it works the other way around just as well. You cannot discern a phenomenon without there being a physical correlate in the actual world. This argument, by the way, killed the belief in ghosts, witches, sorcerers etc., which are all based in the erroneous idea that you can discern phenomena without some physical existent causing them.

The answer to your last question is a qualified ‘yes’. A definition is in fact necessary for us to do philosophy, science, technology (think of medicine without definitions: how could you find a cure?). Definitions include every relevant feature of a group of objects or creatures, which helps us to identify what they are when we encounter a particular specimen. This ability was pretty much proved by biologist Ernst Mayr, who found that natives in New Guinea, without any kind of science whatever, necessarily developed a taxonomy of the wildlife in their habitat. It was a completely spontaneous classification and corresponded almost 100% to his own (scientific) research over 3-4 years.

The qualification I mentioned works this way: We must assume that definitions help us to survive, gather accurate information and assist us in our understanding of he uses of natural products and processes for our own benefit. To that extent we assume that humans are capable of understanding both the world and ourselves. The rider is ‘to a limited and practical extent’. When we go beyond the scope of practical needs and empirical conditions, we put ourselves adrift in the realm of speculation. I’m reasoning here in a perfectly cold and unattached manner: whatever we speculate about, whether in philosophy, religion or science, may be true or false, but it cannot be certain except to the extent that a portion of it may became practically usable or empirically testable (by experiment). What this means is that hundreds of millions of people in history have believed themselves to be absolutely sure that they had certain knowledge (e.g. of their religious faith), yet in a detached, objective perspectives none of these beliefs could ever have been proved, they never have been proved, and unless Descartes is wrong, never will be proved. This is because these issues or existents have no physical correlate. And now we’re back with Plato.