Rethinking Anselm’s Arguments: A Vindication of His Proof for the Existence of God by Richard Campbell (review)

In Rethinking Anselm’s Arguments: A Vindication of his Proof for the Existence of God, Campbell revisits his widely influential study of Anselm’s Proslogion argument (From Belief to Understanding, 1976) and the relevant scholarship of the last four decades. Campbell is far from sanguine: “It is a sad reflection on the current state of philosophical scholarship that most of the ever-growing secondary literature [on Anselm’s Proslogion’s argument for the existence of God] is, as I shall seek to show, fundamentally and demonstrably misconceived” (p. 1). The confusion runs deep: “All of the translations in current circulation misrepresent at least some of [the argument’s] premises” (p. 9). In addition to providing a correct translation and interpretation of Anselm’s text, Campbell argues that Anselm’s argument (correctly interpreted) is deductively valid, contains plausible premises, and is immune to the many objections that have been leveled against its counterfeit look-alikes. Both projects—interpreting the original text and vindicating the argument—are held together by an overarching hermeneutical principle: if two translations or interpretations of the text (all things being equal) are plausible, and the first renders the argument invalid and the second renders it valid, then the second is to be preferred. Campbell’s thesis is that Anselm’s unum argumentum in Proslogion is one, three-stage, cosmological argument for the existence God. The argument begins in Proslogion 2 (stage one) and concludes in Proslogion 3 (stages two and three). The argument begins after Anselm’s prayer in P2: “Ergo, domine, qui das fidei intellectum, da mihi, ut quantum scis expedire intelligam, quia es sicut credimus, et hoc es quod credimus. Et quidem credimus te esse aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit.” The prayer contains first and second person verbs and pronouns. Campbell contends that this prayer is the occasion of, not a premise in, the argument. Yet, in the conclusion of the argument, first and second person verbs and pronouns re-emerge (“Et hoc es tu, domine deus noster”). Until then, the argument uses only third person ones.