Faith, Language, Logic: Anselm of Canterbury and his Project of Logic of Agency
Faith, Language, Logic: Anselm of Canterbury and his Project of Logic of Agency

Summary/Abstract: The Philosophical Fragments (Lambeth Fragments) of St. Anselm of Canterbury are a kind of dictionary that explains the meaning of certain terms, such as: facere, velle, posse, necesse, debere, or agere. They include a discussion, conducted on the intersection of logic and ethics, of such deontic concepts as “obligation” and “goodness.” Through the explication of meanings, Anselm attempts to create a conceptual apparatus for rational proofs of the main tenets of the Christian doctrine and, even more broadly, for the exegesis of Scripture. In addition, this new apparatus allows him to examine some purely philosophical topics, including free will, causation, and the relationship between human freedom and divine foreknowledge. Recently attempts have been made (by D. Walton at the level of syntax and by S. Uckelman at the level of neighborhood semantics) to reconstruct the logic of agency presented in the Philosophical Fragments.The article will briefly introduce the main issues discussed in the Philosophical Fragments. The paper shows that the description and analysis of the verb “facere” mainly in the Philosophical Fragments, but also in Anselm’s other treatises, can be well described within the Aristotelian logical square; however, the article shows some problems in trying to describe the concepts of causation, agency, and action in the language of logic. Thus, the article examines the thesis of the applicability of logic to the fundamental problems of metaphysics, namely causality, especially in the context of human free will and God’s action.

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