SOURCE: Hinderer, Drew E. “Anselm's Ontological Argument: What's in the Fool's Understanding?” Michigan Academician 18, no. 2 (spring 1986): 271-77.

In the following essay, Hinderer contends that Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God fails because its premise that “God exists in the understanding” is problematic and false.

Anselm's ontological arguments have been the subject of very sustained philosophical interest from his own day through the present. The vast majority of those who have written about the arguments have treated them as proofs, i.e., as efforts to persuade unbelievers that the very nature of God's being is such as to make His nonexistence (in this universe) impossible, and hence that He not only exists, but is as Christians believe Him to be, a being than which no greater can be conceived, a being lacking no perfection. Philosophical attention has predominantly rested on the logical mechanics of Anselm's arguments, and...