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One of Anscombe's last pieces of philosophical writing was "Russelm or Anselm?", Philosophical Quarterly, 1993, in which she defended the thesis that Anselm's argument of Proslogion 2 could be saved "from the stupidity of an Ontological Argument" by deletion of a comma. This rests on the claim that in "Si enim in solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re, quod maius est" the second (editorial) comma ought to be omitted; in which interpretation (as "if that than which nothing greater can be thought of exists only in the mind, something which is greater can be conceived to exist also in reality"), the argument does not treat existence as a property of objects and so does not fall foul of Kant's famous objection. |