The Ontological Arguments Of God’s Existence And Its Boundary

This thesis investigates the ontological argument,which is the most attracting and most controversial one among all the arguments concerning the existence of God in the history of Christian philosophy.The core of the problem is the validity of this argument.The reason why the ontological argument is so different is that it is an argument that starts from a pure concept without any empirical element,thus it gets the attention particularly from philosophers.This argument was first raised by Anselm in the medieval age,then it was revised by many modern philosophers especially Descartes and Leibniz.But the ontological argument also suffered fierce criticism led by Gaunilo and Kant.And it was Kant’s criticism that made this argument remain silent in the later years.However,due to the invention of the modal logic in the 20^th century and the endeavors of some American philosophers,the ontological argument seems to have the tendency of reviving today.This thesis will first inspect different versions of the ontological argument and the criticism of them according to the process of history,and the logical method will be implied to analyze them.At the end of the thesis,I will discuss the limitation of using the logical method to exam the ontological argument and talk about the validity and boundary of this argument.