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> many philosophers find it intriguing Citation needed. 1. It's possible to conceive of the greatest possible teapot-shaped 7-foot-tall spaghetti-descended in
by wzdd 3y ago
> many philosophers find it intriguing
Citation needed.
1. It's possible to conceive of the greatest possible teapot-shaped 7-foot-tall spaghetti-descended invisible alien orbiting Jupiter. Even teapot-spaghetti-alien skeptics agree on this.
2. Existing in reality makes something greater than existing only in someone's head (proof: seems reasonable).
3. But we're talking about the greatest possible one of those things (see 1).
4. Therefore such a thing exists.
The article covers this -- it's Gaunilo's Island -- but it's very odd that this keeps coming up as a philosophical puzzler.
- mellosouls 3y ago> many philosophers find it intriguing Citation needed. Other (great) philosophers discussing it are very clearly linked in the article. Spaghetti/teapot stuff Considering the tradition of genuinely great minds taking the argument seriously (including Russell in spite of his facetious teapot), dismissals derived from internet atheist memes look emotional or knee-jerk in comparison, which is possibly why you missed the links.
- wzdd 3y agoIt's unsurprising that "genuinely great minds" raised in a religious tradition would try to apply the tools of their trade to justify what would otherwise surely appear to them to be a very strange and illogical set of beliefs, but that doesn't mean that "many philosophers find it intriguing", and certainly not currently. Russell's ultimate view of it, as I'm sure you know, was to summarise it as "cases of bad grammar", which is also how it appears to this (I happily admit) non-genuinely-great mind: all it is demonstrating is that English is not a formal language.
- slibhb 3y agoI find ontological arguments interesting because so many smart people took them seriously (Leibniz and Godel being two, but there are many more). Even if these kinds of arguments are wrong, their popularity seems to suggest something interesting about human psychology and pitfalls that even geniuses can't always avoid. Ontological arguments are also interesting because of the cricisms they provoked. Hume, Kant, and others famously criticized ontological arguments.
- lemonberry 3y agoIs it possible they took it seriously due to the social and political conditions of the time?
- slibhb 3y agoYou can't rule it out but I'm skeptical. Godel was alive in the 20th century. Spinoza was another philosopher who found the ontological argument convincing and he was such a radical that he was kicked out of the Jewish community he was raised in (i.e. not someone who would have yielded to social pressure).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]