Feb 23, 2020

Five Podcast Episodes On Anselm's Proslogion


One of the often underrated Medieval thinkers who I teach routinely in Introduction to Philosophy classes is Anselm of Canterbury.  He also happens to be the thinker upon whom I've published the most in the course of my academic career - and I point that out mainly to stress that he's definitely a thinker whose works are worth studying.  The work most students encounter him through is the Proslogion - or rather a short portion of it, chapter 2 (maybe supplemented by 3 and 4) - since Anselm provides a version of what later comes to be called the "ontological argument". 

It's a shame that most of the time, people don't read further on in the work, since it is quite fantastic (and even more so in the original Latin).  Even in his own time, there were critics - like the monk Gaunilo - who basically misunderstood what Anselm was up to in the work, and focused in solely on the argument about God's existence.  The Proslogion uses the same line of argument to lead the reader into consideration of the divine attributes, resolution of some seeming paradoxes, discussion of our capacities to even understand God, and in the end even some conjectures about what heaven would be like.

I recently produced five podcast episodes on the Proslogion, drawing upon the core concept videos I'd created for my students on the work. They don't cover the entirety of the ideas contained in the work, but do hit on some of the most important points and passages. (I'll likely shoot more videos on the work and convert those to podcasts this summer.)

All told, the five episodes come to a little over an hour of lectures you can download and listen to wherever you like.  Here they are:

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