Can anyone explain simply to me Descartes Ontological Argument and the differences between this and Anselm's?

Question

PLEASE!!!!

Answer 1

You sent me searching, because I haven't thought about this in a while. Wikipedia has an excellent (but long) description of the two philosophies, complete with criticisms of the thinking.

In summary, they both assert that God exists, but Anselm states that God is the greatest conceivable being without further qualifications ("something than which nothing greater can be imagined"), while Descartes says that God exists because we as imperfect beings have a concept of a perfect being, therefore and since we're imperfect we couldn't come up with such an idea if the being itself didn't exist.

You may find better answers in the philosophy section. Religion rarely moves in such elevated intellectual plains, at least not on Yahoo! Answers.

Answer 2

Wow, you need a catagory all for yourself on this toughy: ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being (part. of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία: science, study, theory) is the study of being or existence. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework. Ontology can be said to study conceptions of reality. Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns refer to entities. Other philosophers contend that some nouns do not name entities but provide a kind of shorthand way of referring to a collection (of either objects or events). In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection of a specific kind of intellectual activity. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, time, truth, causality, and God, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.