Journal article
Nagasawa’s 'Maximal God' and the ontological argument
- Abstract:
- Yujin Nagasawa’s ambitious and ingenious book, Maximal God: A New Defence of Perfect Being Theism (2017), culminates with defences of two different versions of the Ontological Argument, based respectively on the “Classical” version of Saint Anselm (in Chapters 5 and 6) and the “Modal” version of Alvin Plantinga (in Chapter 7). Nagasawa’s approach to both of these is novel and interesting, but in both cases, I shall argue, his attempted defence fails – the Ontological Argument remains powerless to give any support whatever to the claim that a “perfect being” exists. Having argued against each of his arguments individually (in §1 and §2 respectively), I shall end (in §3) by drawing some general – and highly negative – conclusions regarding the prospects for any successful Ontological Argument.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 499.2KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1017/S0034412523000458
Authors
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Journal:
- Religious Studies More from this journal
- Volume:
- 60
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 640 - 666
- Publication date:
- 2023-09-04
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-04-03
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1469-901X
- ISSN:
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0034-4125
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
-
1345450
- Local pid:
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pubs:1345450
- Deposit date:
-
2023-06-01
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Millican, P.
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
- Notes:
- This is the author accepted manuscript following peer review version of the article. The final version is available online from Cambridge University Press at https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0034412523000458
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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