The comments accompanying Proposition (Prop.) 11 (“God … necessarily exists”) in Part I of Spinoza’s The Ethics contain sketches of what appear to be at least three more or less distinct ontological arguments. The first of these is problematic: in A Computationally Assisted Reconstruction of an Ontological Argument in Spinoza’s The Ethics I argue that the proposition “God exists” (GE), an implication of Prop. 11, cannot be derived from the definitions and axioms of Part I (the “DAPI”) of The Ethics; thus, Prop. 11 cannot be derived from the DAPI, either. argues that Prop. 11 is independent of the DAPI. I then augment the DAPI with some auxiliary assumptions I believe Spinoza would accept and that sustain an automated derivation of (GE). The results illustrate how an automated deduction system can be used to facilitate the analysis of the structure of arguments and yield what appears to be a new ontological argument, cast in the style of Spinoza.
The paper whose title is underlined above was last updated 18 March 2019/0737 US Central Time.
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