An Argument On An Ontological Argument - amazonia.fiocruz.br

I used to study philosophy. In a class on the philosophy of religion, we studied several arguments for the existence of God. One that I could never get into was proposed by Source. Anselm of Canterbury in and became known as the ontological argument. My professor set it to the tune of Waltzing Matilda.

One of the verses, as I recall, went like this:.

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Which is to say, Anselm defined God as the greatest being that could be conceived. From this he reasoned that if you had another being that was like God in every way but lacked the attribute of existence, then you could conceive of an identical being who did have the attribute of existence.

The second being would be greater than the first. Ergo, God exists. I was happy to find that Thomas Aquinas skipped this particular argument in his Summa Theologica a century later. And then, inImmanuel Kant drove a stake through its heart. Insisting that being was not an attribute of a concept at all, Kant pointed out that if you had a real sauerbraten and an imaginary sauerbraten, and they both looked and smelled and tasted the same, then there was absolutely no conceptual difference between them.

After the exam, I tucked this esoteric knowledge away until the early Nineties, when the company that employed me became enamored of the quality movement and reengineering. We spent the better part of a year delineating our processes, scrutinizing them, and seeing where we could improve them. An Argument On An Ontological Argument

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Then we would reengineer those that could be improved. For some reason, the ontological argument popped into my head again. She grunted, as I recall, and suggested that we get back to work. They were changed sometimes, but they were never systematically evaluated. Having standards applied made them quality processes.

Essay on The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God

In a slightly different sense, software has always been evaluated, but only to satisfy internal QA departments. Only software that does is usable software. The reason the quality movement became prominent in the early Nineties is that standards began to be applied.

The reason the usability movement became prominent in the late Nineties is that standards changed. And while Anselm may have regarded his argument as unquestionable, no one is likely to say that about usability standards in the near future. Share This. Latest Posts.]