I’ve got a proof which I think demonstrates that, given the conditions laid down in Descartes’ Meditations III and IV, there is no most perfect thing. Since I’ve already turned in the paper and received a grade, I figure I could show this off without violating the no-homework rule. So, is this proof valid? If we keep just to the premises used by Descarte in his Meditations, is it sound?
Proof: There is no most perfect thing(by contradiction).
Suppose G, the most perfect thing. Suppose i(G), the idea of the most perfect thing, which can, by the causation principle, only have come from G. Suppose i(G + 1), the idea of a thing more perfect than the most perfect thing. i(G + 1) has no physical analogue, of course, since G + 1 cannot exist. The idea of G + 1, however, can.
Now, G is sufficiently perfect that i(G) implies G.
G+1 is at least as perfect as G.
Therefore, i(G+1) implies that G+1 exists.
But, we’ve already established that G+1 can’t exist.
We have a contradiction.
QED.
Isn’t this the same as the problem with Anselm’s “proof” that God exists? Namely (inter alia) it contains the implicit assumption that existence is a (or is a form of) perfection? Why would that be?
Suppose I suggest that God should go through the meditations and conceive of the most perfect being just as RD’s meditator did. Because if he, like Descartes’s meditator, rejected all his naive assumptions, he would be in the same place the meditator was, wouldn’t he? This might make for better ground than trying to work out “more than most perfect” which, at the least, is logically impossible if “most” means what it does in everyday English.
Huerta, part of Descartes’s claim was that the idea of perfection in a flawed being such as himself could only come from a perfect being which, therefore, must exist.