2 - Aquinas

Summary

This chapter traces Aquinas’ discussions of ‘ontological’ arguments through his works and evaluates his arguments. It emerges that he makes good points against the specific arguments he targets. The chapter also highlights a difference between contemporary approaches to such arguments and Aquinas’. For us, they concern whether to add a perfect being to our ontological inventory. For Aquinas, a perfect being was part of the inventory already, and such arguments really address an epistemological issue: whether one could know that God exists a priori.