The Christian Vanguard

The following is an essay I had to turn in for my analytic philosophy class.  Analytic philosophy begins with Immanuel Kant and his distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are those which express nothing in the predicate which is not already in the concept, whereas synthetic propositions are those which do predicate something to the subject, and thus amplifies our knowledge (“Prolegomena” p.10).1Because the predicate is already thought up in the concept, all analytic propositions have the property of being a priori in nature, whereas synthetic propositions can be either a priori or a posteriori (Ibid. p.10).2There is some contention about whether there really is synthetic a priori knowledge, however, since synthetic judgments are often thought to come from experience, which doesn’t seem to be part of what it means to be a priori.3Kant argues that mathematical judgements are synthetic a priori, since they do not directly rely on the principle o...

Probably the most well known objection to St. Anselm's Ontological argument, usually attributed to Kant, says that existence is not a predicate. When we inquire into the nature of things, we say that it is this shape and that color, and these statements have some meaningful content to them because we are able to predicate something to them. They tell us something about the object. However, saying that X exists tells us nothing about the nature of the object. So being is not a predicate.  This is not the view of the scholastics, and definitely not the view of St. Thomas Aquinas, who does say being (or existence) is a predicate. So how then do we deal with the above objection? Let's look at the mode of inquiry. When we ask what something is, we answer by giving a more common term to which we add a specific difference. So when we ask what a cat is, we say it is a mammal that has this or that distinguishing feature. We may ask what this more common thing is as well, and we ...