The article analyzes Anselm of Canterbury’s development of three meanings of “nothing” in the Monologion, and a fourth in three later works: De casu diaboli, one of his letters, and his Incomplete Work. By focusing exclusively on the points where the meaning of nothing is first presented and then successively redefined, we can see that Anselm rejects the idea of creation ex nihilo by arguing that the things created by God had some form of existence before they were created, and (...) that creation refers not to coming into existence but to coming into being. In the three later works Anselm extends the meaning of nothing to show that it has a surprisingly positive content, since it is a term of negation that has meaning only in terms of what it excludes or negates. Anselm’s analysis of nothing seems to presage many modern discussions this subject. (shrink)

The life and career of Adolf Hitler has long been a mystery to scholars. Central to that mystery is Hitler's youth. So far, scholars have found little in Hitler's youth that presages or augurs Hitler's subsequent political development or explains his phenomenal success in his rise to power. Many historians and biographers have noted a strange logic to Hitler's career. Yet that logic has never been identified. Clearly, it is neither deductive nor inductive logic. Charles Sanders Peirce discovered a "third (...) form of logic" that he called "abduction." Abductive logic has unique characteristics and exerts a strange power over the human mind that is very different from other forms logic. Although the discovery of abductive logic is relatively recent, it has long existed and has been identified as the basis of two streams of literature that became extremely popular at about the time of Hitler's birth: the detective story, embodying a new type of fictional hero, "Ratiocinative Man," which bears a strong resemblance to Hitler; and the tracker stream, exemplified by Voltaire's "Zadig" and the novels of Karl May, which Hitler early encountered and which exerted a lifelong influence on him. In this work, the author presents the nature and characteristics of abductive logic, and explains how Hitler may have employed this logic in his rise to power. The author then presents Peirce's theory of interpretation of historical documents and applies it to the facts of Hitler's youth to explain the genesis of der Fuehrer from his earliest recollections to his mountaintop experience in which he conceived himself as the leader of the German people. (shrink)