Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-wq2xx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T11:21:55.869Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Ontological’ arguments from experience: Daniel A. Dombrowski, Iris Murdoch, and the nature of divine reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2012

ELIZABETH D. BURNS
ELIZABETH D. BURNS*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Heythrop College, University of London, Kensington Square, London W8 5HN, UK e-mail: e.burns@heythrop.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Dombrowski and Murdoch offer versions of the ontological argument which aim to avoid two types of objection – those concerned with the nature of the divine, and those concerned with the move from an abstract concept to a mind-independent reality. For both, the nature of the concept of God/Good entails its instantiation, and both supply a supporting argument from experience. It is only Murdoch who successfully negotiates the transition from an abstract concept to the instantiation of that concept, however, and this is achieved by means of an ontological argument from moral experience which, in a reversal of the Kantian doctrine, depends ultimately on a form of the cosmological argument.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 459 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anselm (1962a) Proslogium, in St Anselm: Basic Writings, Deane, S. N. (tr.) (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company), 47–80.Google Scholar
Anselm (1962b) Anselm's Apologetic: In Reply to Gaunilon's Answer in Behalf of the Fool, in St Anselm: Basic Writings, Deane, S. N. (tr.) (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company), 311–328.Google Scholar
Antonaccio, Maria (2012) ‘The virtues of metaphysics: a review of Iris Murdoch's philosophical writings’, in Broakes (2012), 155–179.Google Scholar
Aquinas (2008) Summa Theologica, Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trs.), <www.newadvent.org/summa>..>Google Scholar
Blackburn, Simon (1992) ‘The good and the great: knowledge, virtue and uplift in a benighted world’, Times Literary Supplement, 23 October, 3–4.Google Scholar
Blackson, Thomas A. (1995) Inquiry, Forms, and Substances: A Study in Plato's Metaphysics and Epistemology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broakes, Justin (ed.) (2012) Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Byrne, P. A. (1998) The Moral Interpretation of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).Google Scholar
Cottingham, John (2009) Why Believe? (London: Continuum).Google Scholar
Coxon, A. H. (1999) The Philosophy of Forms: An Analytical and Historical Commentary on Plato's Parmenides (Assen: Van Gorcum).Google Scholar
Dancy, R. M. (2004) Plato's Introduction of Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Despland, Michael (1985) The Education of Desire: Plato and the Philosophy of Religion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).Google Scholar
Dombrowski, Daniel A. (2006) Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Response (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farland, Douglas (2005) ‘Mackie's error theory and reasons’, South African Journal of Philosophy, 24, 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fendt, Gene (2005) ‘The relation of Monologion and Proslogion’, The Heythrop Journal, 46, 149–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fine, Gail (2003) ‘Forms as causes: Plato and Aristotle’, in Fine, Gail (ed.) Plato on Knowledge and Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 350–396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaunilo (1962) In Behalf of the Fool, in St Anselm: Basic Writings, Deane, S. N. (tr.) (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company), 303–311.Google Scholar
Goodyer, Jennifer Spencer (2009) ‘The blank face of love: the possibility of goodness in the literary and philosophical work of Iris Murdoch’, Modern Theology, 25, 217–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grabowski, Francis A. III (2008) Plato, Metaphysics and the Forms (London: Continuum).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, Gordon (1996) ‘Spiritualized morality and traditional religion’, Ratio, 9, 78–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, Theodore M. (1960) ‘The historical context and religious significance of Kant's Religion’ in Kant, Immanuel, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone’, Theodore M. Greene & Hoyt H. Hudson (trs.) (New York: Harper Torchbooks), ix–lxxviii.Google Scholar
Guerin, Caroline (1992) ‘Iris Murdoch – a revisionist theology? A comparative study of Iris Murdoch's Nuns and Soldiers and Sara Maitland's Virgin Territory’, Literature and Theology, 6, 153–170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hampson, Daphne (2009) ‘Searching for God?’, in Cornwell, John & McGhee, Michael (eds) Philosophers and God: At the Frontier of Faith and Reason (London: Continuum), 63–76.Google Scholar
Hartshorne, Charles (1941) Man's Vision of God (New York: Harper and Row).Google Scholar
Hartshorne, Charles, & Reese, William (eds) (2000) Philosophers Speak of God (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books).Google Scholar
Insole, Christopher J. (2006) ‘“Beyond glass doors … the sun is no longer shining”: English Platonism and the problem of self-love in the literary and philosophical work of Iris Murdoch’, Modern Theology, 22, 111–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Alan (1995) ‘Go(o)d in Iris Murdoch’, First Things, 50, <www.firstthings.com/article/2008/08/003-good-in-iris-murdoch-39>.Google Scholar
Johnson, J. Prescott (1963) ‘The ontological argument in Plato’, The Personalist, 44, 24–34.Google Scholar
Jordan, Robert William (1983) Plato's Arguments for Forms (Cambridge: The Cambridge Philological Society).Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel (1929) Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith (tr.) (London: Macmillan).Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel (1960) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (tr.) (New York: Harper Torchbooks).Google Scholar
Kerr, Fergus (1997) Immortal Longings: Visions of Transcending Humanity (London: SPCK, 1997), ch. 4, ‘Back to Plato with Iris Murdoch’, 68–88.Google Scholar
Malcolm, Norman (2003) ‘Anselm's ontological arguments’, in Taliaferro, C. and Griffiths, P. (eds) (2003) Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell), 271–281. First published in The Philosophical Review, 69 (1960), 41–62.Google Scholar
Mulhall, Stephen (2007) ‘“All the world must be ‘religious’”: Iris Murdoch's ontological arguments’, in Rowe, Anne (ed.) Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 23–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murdoch, Iris (1966) The Unicorn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).Google Scholar
Murdoch, Iris (1981) Nuns and Soldiers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).Google Scholar
Murdoch, Iris (1985) The Sovereignty of Good (London: ARK).Google Scholar
Murdoch, Iris (1988) The Book and the Brotherhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).Google Scholar
Murdoch, Iris (1992) Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus).Google Scholar
Oppy, Graham (1995) Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Pascal, Blaise (1966) Pensées, A. J. Krailsheimer (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).Google Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (2007) ‘A contemporary modal version of the ontological argument’, in Peterson, Michael, Hasker, William, Reichenbach, Bruce, & Basinger, David (eds) (2007) Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 181–193. Extract reprinted from God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).Google Scholar
Plato (1945) Republic, Francis MacDonald Cornford (tr.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Silber, John R. (1960) ‘Preface to the second edition of this translation’, in Kant (1960), cxxxix–cxlii.Google Scholar
John, Smith (1968) Experience and God (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Widdows, Heather (2005) The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (Basingstoke: Ashgate).Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (tr.) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).Google Scholar