I wish to defend a version of the Cosmological Argument. But the phrase ‘the Cosmological Argument’ has been used to refer to various arguments, some of them very different from each other. Let me, then, say at the outset that with some of these I am either out of sympathy, or I am just plain unsure.

Take, for example, the argument for God’s existence offered by Locke in Book IV, Chapter X of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. ‘Man knows’, says Locke, ‘by an intuitive certainty that bare nothing can no more produce any real being than it can be equal to two right angles’. So for Locke, if anything exists it is caused to exist by something else. And Locke thinks that what belongs to anything that exists, its nature, must be derived from something else, and that God therefore exists. For if something exists, says Locke, it must have been caused to exist. This means that ‘from eternity there has been something, since what was not from eternity had a beginning, and what had a beginning must be produced by something else’. But this argument is invalid. According to Locke, if something has existed from eternity, there is an eternal being. ‘If, therefore’, says Locke, ‘we know there is some real being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something’. But all Locke’s argument shows is that there has always been something, which is quite compatible with there having been a whole host of different things. In other words, Locke thinks he has proved the equivalent of:

In distinguishing between character and role in Shakespeare’s plays, Peter Ure once wrote:

Few critics spoke with greater conviction about the “inward self’ of the Shakespearean protagonist, but it is with the outward selves of the protagonists of The Merchant of Venice that we shall be concerned in what follows. It is at least arguable that the somewhat confused state of debate about this play is owing to the resolute concentration of attention upon the “inward selves” of Portia, Antonio, and Shylock, and to the too-easy assumptions that are made about the nature and importance of their roles. To suggest that the fabric of meaning in The Merchant of Venice depends absolutely upon the identification of roles in the terms in which Shakespeare conceived them is not to underestimate the interest and importance of the ways in which character regularly pulls against role, for what Peter Ure said is perhaps more true of this play than of many. This, nevertheless, is a truth which can be apprehended only if the conception of role is properly appreciated; if it is not appreciated, neither is the nature or purpose of the tension Peter Ure was attempting to define.

When it comes to the crunch, how does one know what other people are thinking, feeling etc? One way — the classical modern-philosophical way — of dealing with this question is to say that one knows what others are thinking etc. from analogy with one’s own case. Another way, however, is to go back to the Aristotelian conception of the soul as form of the body — which rules out radical scepticism about other people’s minds. In comparison with the Platonic story, at any rate, Aristotle’s view seems like plain common sense. On the other hand, the imaginative power of the Platonic story is so immense that liberation from it cannot be easily achieved. It is possible to read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as an intervention in this long debate. By resorting to St Augustine’s picture of how (why) an infant acquires language, as he does at the beginning of the Investigations, isn’t Wittgenstein inviting his readers to learn to tell a different story about the soul from the one that is so entrenched in the Christian spiritual tradition?

Scepticism about our knowledge of other people’s minds, feelings, etc., may thus be met by the argument that one infers the existence of such hidden entities from analogy with one’s own case. But this concedes far too much to scepticism. This argument remains under the spell of the myth of the homunculus peeping suspiciously through the eyelet-holes of his face-mask at the surrounding horde of similarly masked creatures, all no doubt engaged in equivalent inferences. One alternative to this radically paranoid-solipsist conception is to return to the relatively ‘physicalist’ approach to be found in Aristotle (and perhaps, by qualified extrapolation, in Thomas Aquinas).