Abstract

IN A DISCUSSION OF ARGUMENTS concerning the existence of God, James Ross comments that we know that the premises of such arguments “are infinitely analysable, that they can be subject to an illimitable series of questions and that every question can be answered in more than one way.” The record of disputes over the “third way” of Aquinas certainly confirms these statements. Those disputes revolve around issues about which questions are continually raised in spite of strenuous attempts made at settling them. An issue often raised on the contemporary scene is the logically simple and philosophically very serious claim that the third way commits a version of the fallacy of composition or a quantifier shift that undermines the legitimacy of the argument.