Philosophy Essay Competition Winners
We are very proud to announce the Cogito Education Philosophy Essay Competition Winners! This year, as every year, there have been some truly excellent entries, and it has been a difficult task choosing the best from a hugely impressive cohort.
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1st Place
“Is the Ontological Argument Sound?”
By Yi Shan Tse
Introduction
The Ontological Argument aims to prove the existence of God through deductive a priori reasoning and analytically true premises. An argument is sound if and only if it is formally valid (meaning it is ‘impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false’ 1 and made up of true premises. Using examples from Descartes and Plantinga, I will argue that, despite its formal validity, the Ontological Argument is not sound: each version contains at least one explicit or implicit dubious premise.
Existence is not a Real Predicate
The first way the Ontological Argument can be flawed is through assuming existence is a real predicate, best illustrated through the version proposed by Descartes 2 :
P1. I have a clear and distinct idea of God as a being with all perfections.
P2. If I clearly and distinctly conceive of x having some property F, x has property F.
P3. If God has all perfections, God has the perfection of existence.
C. Therefore, God exists.
Displayed in this way, Descartes’ argument is formally valid. This validity can be demonstrated by applying modus ponens 3. Assuming the premises are true, P1 affirms the antecedent of P2; in turn, P2 affirms the antecedent of P3, which would guarantee the truth of the conclusion. However, to be sound, its premises must be true in reality – which is not the case.
The problematic premise is P3. As Kant 4 correctly identifies, Descartes conflates logical and real predicates. While existence may be a predicate in a logical sense, to say ‘God exists’ merely ‘posit[s] the predicate in its relation to the subject’ 5
In other words, it fails to add meaning to the concept of God. This mistake is equivalent to claiming that ‘The bottle is on the table’ expands on the concept ‘bottle’ in the same way ‘The bottle is black’ expands on the concept to make the new concept ‘black bottle’. Therefore, it is not analytically true that a being with all perfections must exist. This mistake is present in any argument that discusses existence rather than necessary existence, including that initially proposed by Anselm 6, assuming a being actually existing is greater than one ‘exist[ing] only in the understanding’ 7. Thus, Kant’s objection poses one of the most significant problems facing the Ontological Argument.
Circular Reasoning
Responders to Kant typically argue for the necessary existence, rather than what I will henceforth refer to as the “mere” existence, of God. As it expands on the concept of God, this necessary existence could be considered a real predicate. Because they are concerned with necessity, such arguments are referred to as modal. However, these modal arguments inevitably 3
commit the informal fallacy of circular reasoning, assuming God’s existence within their premises. This issue is exemplified in Plantinga’s 8 so-called “victorious” modal argument:
P1. A thing has unsurpassable greatness if and only if it has maximal excellence in every possible world.
P2. There is a possible world in which unsurpassable greatness is exemplified.
C. Therefore, there is a thing (God) which necessarily has maximal excellence in every world, including this one.
As with Descartes, modus ponens may be applied: this rule again reveals the argument to be formally valid.
However, the argument is still not sound as the reasoning employed is circular, making it informally invalid. It could be the case that there is necessarily no thing with unsurpassable greatness – making P2 false – precisely because there are possible worlds where there is no such thing. All Plantinga can establish is if there is a being with unsurpassable greatness, it has maximal excellence in every world; and if there is not a being with unsurpassable greatness, it necessarily does not have maximal excellence in every world. Therefore, Plantinga fails to establish the necessary existence of God without relying on the dubious assumption that God exists. This issue is present in other modal variations of the Ontological Argument, such as Malcolm’s 9 development of Anselm’s argument.
Conclusion
Overall, the problem with the Ontological Argument lies within its nature as a deductive a priori argument. Although they lead to stronger conclusions than inductive arguments, it is difficult to draw useful conclusions as the scope for premises is limited to statements true in virtue of the meaning of their words. Arguments aiming to prove the existence of God a priori must attempt to argue that existence is inherent within the concept of God, but if existence is not a real predicate, such a proof is impossible. While some believe arguing for necessary existence solves the problem, this approach only delays the inevitable. The furthest conclusion these arguments will establish is if God exists, God exists necessarily. Hence, this route still requires establishing the mere existence of God to reach its full conclusion. Therefore, the Ontological Argument cannot be sound.
Bibliography
Anselm, St. Monologion and Proslogion. Translated by Thomas Williams. Hackett Publishing, 1996.
Carey, Toni V. “The Ontological Argument and the Sin of Hubris.” Philosophy Now, September 1, 2011. https://philosophynow.org/issues/53/The_Ontological_Argument_and_the_Sin_of_Hubris.
Descartes, René. René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy. Edited by John Cottingham and Arthur Bernard. Translated by John Cottingham. 1641. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Howard Caygill and Gary Banham. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Revised Second. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Magnus, P. D. ForallX: An Introduction to Formal Logic. 1.4 ed., 2017. https://www.fecundity.com/logic/.
Malcolm, Norman. “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments.” The Philosophical Review 69, no. 1 (January 1960): 41. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2182266.
Oppy, Graham. “Ontological Arguments.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N Zalta and Uri Nodelman, 2023. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/ontological-arguments/.
Plantinga, Alvin. The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
Pollard, Luke. “Ontological Arguments: A Brief Introduction.” cogito.education, May 18, 2023. https://cogito.education/ontological-arguments-a-brief-introduction/.
Wingard, John C. “On a Not Quite yet ‘Victorious’ Modal Version of the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 33, no. 1 (1993): 47–57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40020949.
Footnotes
1. P. D. Magnus, ForallX: An Introduction to Formal Logic, 1.4 ed., 2017, 8, https://www.fecundity.com/logic/. )
2. René Descartes, René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. John Cottingham and Arthur Bernard, trans. John Cottingham (1641; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45–46.
3. Magnus, ForallX, 108.
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Howard Caygill and Gary Banham, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Revised Second (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 500–507.
5. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 505. .
6. St. Anselm, Monologion and Proslogion, trans. Thomas Williams (Hackett Publishing, 1996), 99–102.
7. Anselm, Monologion and Proslogion, 100.
8. Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 213–17.
9. Norman Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” The Philosophical Review 69, no. 1 (January 1960): 41, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2182266.
2nd Place
“Is the Ontological Argument Sound?”
By Adi Chatterjee
Is the Ontological Argument sound?
I will argue that St. Anslem’s ontological argument is “so much labour and effort lost”1 because it cannot prove God from deductive, a priori reasoning. This is because existence is not a predicate, so Anselm’s argument fails. Furthermore, Anselm mistakenly believes that an infinite God is knowable through the intellect of a finite being – something that Aquinas, Gaunilo and Augustine would firmly disagree with.
St. Anselm argues in the Prosologion that:
- God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of”.
- If God only exists in intellectu (in the mind) instead of in re (in reality) then he would not be that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
- Therefore, God must exist in re.
This is not a convincing argument as Kant pointed out, existence is not a predicate because it is not a ‘perfection’, to use Descartes2 phrase in his reformation of Anselm’s ontological argument. Aristotle argued that there are two types of predicates – accidental and essential. Existence is neither as it is not a quality that an object might or might not have. Bertrand Russell used the example of the claim “the present King of France is bald”3, which seems like a meaningful, falsifiable phrase. However, it is meaningless as there is no present King of France in the same way which atheists argue that there is no God. We could simply reject the claim that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” which makes predicating God of anything meaningless. Therefore, Anselm’s ontological argument is not sound.
Critics of Kant such as Hartshorne and Quine4, drawing on Hegel, argued that Kant had a limited ‘worldview’ and necessary existence is a predicate. While they would concede to Kant that existential claims must be synthetic, meaning that they must be verified through the senses, God is transcendent and necessary – God falls outside the set of ordinary existence. Frege also argues that existence is a second-order predicate, while necessity can be a first-order predicate5 – which Anselm’s reformation in Proslogion II treats God’s existence as. The ontological argument treats necessary existence as a predicate, God is necessarily existent, therefore must exist as Norman Malcom6 argued in his reformulation. This proves that, while Kant was right that existence is not a predicate, necessary existence is one, therefore Anselm succeeds at proving the fool wrong through reason alone.
This argument is not convincing however as we could simply reject the idea that God’s existence is necessary. As Russell commented, necessity should only be reserved for analytical and mathematical statements7 therefore Anselm’s second formulation does not improve on the first. JN Findlay8 argued that as necessary existence is impossible without substantiation. As Anselm cannot fall back on necessary existence, all his argument does is state that ‘if God exists in reality, then he would have to exist in reality.’ As the atheist can disagree with the claim God exists, Anslem fails at proving God through reason alone.
Perhaps more damaging to Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence comes from Gaunilo and Aquinas. In “on behalf of the fool”, Gaunilo pointed out that we cannot conceive of a being greater than all others. Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, argued that “we do not know the essence of God” so we cannot use his definition to prove him, we need a posteriori arguments to prove God. Therefore, the OA is unsound as we do not understand this ‘supreme nature’.
Anselm would argue that we do not need a full understanding of God’s nature for his argument to work. Peter Van Inwagen illustrates, “even if we cannot look directly at the sun, it does not follow that we cannot see daylight.” We have a partial understanding of the qualities of perfection and from that we can take a ‘leap of faith’ as Kierkegaard would argue for. Therefore, the deductive reasoning of the Ontological argument is sound.
I am unconvinced by this argument because, as Augustine remarked, “If you think you have grasped him, it is not God you have grasped”. This is the main reason that I view Anselm’s ontological argument as not being sound to convince ‘the fool’ with only philosopher Yujin Nagasawa9 being convinced into theistic belief. Therefore, Anselm fails to set out what he wanted to accomplish.
In conclusion, I agree with Schopenhauer that the ontological argument is a “charming joke”. It is not sound to argue that existence, and even necessary existence, is a perfection and that we can understand God. It is possible that, as John Cottingham argues10, Anselm’s argument was a prayer and a reflection of his moto ‘Faith, seeking, understanding’ which was used to reaffirm his faith. For those with a religious worldview, the Ontological Argument is sound at reaffirming faith yet to the atheist it is thoroughly unsound.
Footnotes
[1] Kant, Immanuel (1781) Critique of Pure Reason
[2] Descartes, René (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy
[3] Russell, Bertrand (1905) On Denoting
[4] Quine, W. V. O. (1996) Philosophy of logic (2nd ed.)
[5] Frege, Gottlab (1884) Foundations of Arithmetic
[6] Malcom, Norman (1960) Anselm’s Ontological Arguments
[7] Russell, Bertrand (1903) The Principles of Mathematics
[8] Findlay, J. N. (1948) Can God’s existence be disproved?
[9] Nagasawa, Yujin (2011) The Existence of God: A Philosophical Introduction
[10] Cottingham, John (2009) Why Believe?
3rd Place
“Can you explain consciousness?”
By Lucie Powell
Consciousness has been at the forefront of philosophical debate for centuries, from Plotinus to Descartes to Nagel. There have been several attempts to define and explain it, with varying levels of success. The strongest of these is consciousness as an evolutionary process. However, while this may successfully explain how and why consciousness evolved, it does not account for exactly what consciousness is. Therefore, the workings of consciousness may be explained but the exact workings of individual minds and their experience of consciousness remain ineffable.
In his book ‘Self Comes to Mind’ (2010), neuroscientist Damasio defines consciousness as ‘a state of mind in which there is knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings’. To Damasio, consciousness contains ‘many grades between the core and autobiographical endpoints’. [1] This is one of the various theories that neuroscientists are producing as an attempt to explain consciousness; I enjoy this take’s concise and straightforward explanation. However, the idea of consciousness as a sliding scale brings forward questions of how we define and communicate where on the scale we land. How can I be sure that I am on the same rung of the metaphorical ‘consciousness ladder’ as the person who sits beside me on the bus? Is there any way to articulate exactly what process my mind is working through, and whether my own process is more or less complex than any other person?
This leads to the question of ‘qualia’ – the subjective, private and ineffable experience of being you. [2] Damasio may be able to explain what consciousness is and how it is that the brain works, but he is unable to define qualia. Just as I am unable to know if I have the same level of consciousness as the person next to me on the bus, I am unable to know exactly what it is that they are experiencing in that very moment, and they are unable to know the same of me. Thomas Nagel poses the two questions of ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ and ‘what is it like for a bat to be a bat?’. [3] There is an inherent difference between subjective and objective points of view, and so with the subjectivity of qualia, a human can never experience the consciousness of anyone or anything else as they experience it. Anything is particularly relevant recently with the rise of AI.
With the rate at which technology is developing today, will AI be able to develop consciousness? In the St Paul’s Cathedral online resource Robot Souls: AI and what it means to be human, Eve Poole appears to disagree: ‘If you don’t have a sense of God or that we’re special or anything, then…as AI gets more complex, it will have to evolve consciousness as a way of coping with its own processing.’ [4] The implication is that she disagrees with this due to her own Christian faith. However, others may disagree for other reasons. Returning to Damasio, in the article ‘Could a Robot be Conscious?’, Brian King discusses Self Comes To Mind and argues that ‘while a robot could mimic human behaviour and be programmed to do certain tasks, it would not be valid to ascribe feelings to it unless it had a body which required internal homeostatic control through its brain’. [5] Therefore, it appears a widely shared view that consciousness is an inherently human (or inherently animal) trait that robots would be unable to develop. David Chalmers’ proposal of zombies as humans without qualiac experiences [6] can be applied to the question of AI. Robots may be able to one day process experiences the exact way that we do but without experiencing qualia. This suggests that qualia is the human/animal trait that makes consciousness unattainable to artificial beings.
To conclude, consciousness is a difficult concept to truly explain. While the objective, physical process may be able to be explained through neuroscience and evolution, the subjective, private experiences of it remain ineffable. It is impossible to communicate to others exactly what it is that I am experiencing, just as it is impossible to understand what others are experiencing. I find myself agreeing with Stuart Sunderland, a British psychologist, who wrote that ‘consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved’. [7] In summary, consciousness can be explained as an evolutionary process. However, we cannot truly define or explain exactly what that process is.
[1] Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010)
[2] Cogito, The Hard Problem of Consciousness, https://cogito.education/hard-problem-of-consciousness/
[3] Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? (1974)
[4] Robot Souls: AI and what it means to be human (2023), St Paul’s Cathedral learning resources, https://www.stpauls.co.uk/resources/robot-souls-ai-and-what-it-means-to-be-human
[5] Brian King, Could a Robot be Conscious?, Philosophy Now Issue 125: April/May 2018
[6] David Chalmers, according to Cogito, The Hard Problem of Consciousness, https://cogito.education/hard-problem-of-consciousness/
[7] Stuart Sunderland, International Dictionary of Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1996)