ed apart from the objects themselves. Thus, Aristotle says, Plato's idea that Ideas are perfect entities, intangible to subjective human experience, is meaningless, for all standards are based somewhere in ordinary human activity and perception. Thirdly, Aristotle assails Plato's efforts to find something common to several similar objects at once, a perfect exemplar of the quality those things share. Beauty is a perfect example; Plato considered Beauty both a notion and an ideal, isolated by abstractions and fixed permanently while its representatives fade away. Aristotle claims that abstractions like Beauty cannot be cast as absolutes, independent of temporal human experience; the Idea of Beauty changes with time and individual perceptions and cannot (as Plato felt) exist forever as a concrete standard. Plato and Aristotle reach some agreement, though, on the topic of reality. Plato believes that all reality was derived from his Ideas (which themselves dealt with concrete hierarchy of rational ideas. St. Anselm, though, makes the most dogmatic and logically tortuous case for God's existence, relying not upon explanations of goodness, truth, or rational order of ideas but upon an absurd argument. He claims that everyone has some sense of God, and he claims that for one to deny God's existence is an invalid and contradictory assertion; therefore, God exists. Also, Anselm believes that those capable of understanding God cannot believe that he does not exist - as if the enormity of the idea was so clear than only a fool could not perceive it. His arguments seem the weakest of the four viewpoints here, for they are riddled with dogma and assume that God is a constant - using faith alone. Anselm considers faith paramount to logic or other forms of thought and asks no questions as to what powers the universe or what goodness is - he basically follows the Christian "party line" too closely to be valid. In general, St. Augustine combines Plato'...
