Article Sidebar
Published:
Jun 1, 2023Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
A comparative approach to the theistic proofs of Anselm of Canterbury’s ‘Monologion’
Abstract
The four theistic proofs of Monologion are based on the categories of being per se and being per aliud. This article analyses them through a comparative approach. The categories of per se and per aliud are compared with the categories of substance (ti) and function (yong) as touched on the first chapter of the Rectifying Ignorance (正蒙 Zhengmeng) of Zhang Zai (1020–1077), an exponent of neo-Confucianism. In fact, the two pairs of categories explain the relationship between an absolute, the supreme nature (summum) or the Great Void (太虚 taixu) and the sensible world. Through the comparison, this article highlights the fundamental function of being per aliud in the rational knowledge of the supreme nature that exists per se and provides new insights into the process of derivation of being per aliud from the being per se.
Contribution: This article, through the comparison with the Chinese philosophical tradition, intends to offer a new perspective on the understanding of the Anselmian categories of being per se and being per aliud.
