THE DISPUTE OVER UNIVERSALS AND ANSELMIAN REALISM

Abstract

The use of reason in the act of knowing God, led to the secularization of Western theological doctrine and its emergence in the eleventh century (and the beginning of the second Christian millennium), and the use of reason in understanding faith, with the introduction of the well-known Anselmian phrase understand what you think. Through Anselm's rational approach, philosophical speculation became an instrument for explaining the dogmas of faith. Anselm starts from the date of faith, encountered in his works by the fact that God exists and that nothing greater can be conceived. Faith is the essential premise for asserting the existence of God, having no empirical means to scientifically prove something so complex and almost impossible to understand. Anselm conceives a meditation on the reason of faith and thus demonstrates the existence of God, through what would later be called Immanuel Kant, the ontological argument. According to the definition offered by Gheorghe Vlăduțescu, Anselm was concerned with an inductive legitimation, of the determined being (of the second being), towards the determining being. This premise of the inductance of reason, appears in Anselmian realism, when trying to identify certain concepts called universals, with the essence of reality.