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Plantinga, hartshorne, and the ontological argument

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References

  1. ‘Hartshorne's 1962 book’ is Charles hartshorne,The Logic of Perfection, La Salle, Illinois, 1962. ‘My (Purtill's) 1966 paper’ is R. L. Purtill, ‘Hartshorne's Modal Proof,Journal of Philosophy, LX111 (1966).

  2. Alvin Plantinga,God, Freedom, and Evil, New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Plantinga muddies the waters, unfortunately, by referring to this as ‘A similar but simpler version of the argument’ (The Nature of Necessity, p. 216). Alvin Plantinga,God, Freedom, and Evil, New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

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  3. I have modified Plantinga's presentation inGod, Freedom, and Evil here only for the sake of clarity. Plantinga presents steps (12) through (15) discursively, and I have added (10a) so as to indicate what lies behind (10b). Plantinga at one point restates his central premise as maintaining ‘that the existence of a maximally great being is possible’ (God, Freedom, and Evil, p. 112) InThe Nature of Necessity Plantinga complicates this argument slightly by adding an essence E which entails ‘has maximal greatness in a world W.’

  4. I try to do precisely this in ‘Plantinga's God and Other Monstrosities’, forthcoming inReligious Studies. Thus despite skipping quickly past it here I think Purtill's argument for epistemological agnosticism can, with a bit of patience, be urged against Plantinga's argument as it stands.

  5. Alvin Plantinga,The Nature of Necessity, p. 45.

  6. This paper was written under the auspices of a Mellon Faculty Fellowship administered by Washington University.

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  1. State University of New York at Stony Brook, U.S.A.

    Patrick Grim

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  1. Patrick Grim
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Grim, P. Plantinga, hartshorne, and the ontological argument. SOPH 20, 12–16 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02789922

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