In a letter to Nancy Warner, October 26,
1963, C.S.Lewis refers to chapter 12 of "The Silver Chair" and refers
to Puddleglums rejoinder to the witch as an "ontological proof,"
indebted to Anselm and Descartes.
On
April 20, 2021, at our monthly C.S. Lewis
meeting, David Werther presented his paper
saying that Puddleglum's argument is not a purely conceptual
argument, an
analysis of an idea or ideas, and therefore cannot be an instance of
the
ontological argument found in Anselm's Proslogion and Decartes's fifth
meditation. Unfortunately Walter Hooper both identified it as
such, and
misstated Anselm's ontological argument in footnote on Lewis's
letter,
page 1472, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis Volume III, Narnia,
Cambridge
and Joy 1950-1963. David suggested that in interpreting Lewis's
comments in his
letter of October 26th, 1963, the proper approach is to begin with an
outline
of Puddleglum's line of reasoning and then consider what Lewis
might have
meant by "ontological proof" and where such a proof might be found in
Anselm and Descartes. Doing so, takes us to the argument in Descartes'
third
meditation and the Cartesian principle of causal adequacy, and perhaps
to the
early chapters of Anselm's Monologion.
