St. Anselm and the Logical Syntax of Agency

In a fascinating fragment, Lambeth Manuscript 59 , 1 St. Anselm of Canterbury has bequeathed to us the foundations of a logical syntax of agency utilizing the strikingly modern-seeming device of treating agency as a statement operator. This approach, whereby the syntax of agency becomes similar to that of the negation operator in classical sentence logic, is currently a subject of considerable interest because of recent developments in action theory, 2 modal logic, 3 and generative semantics. 4 One might reasonably expect that there might be little coherent historical precedent for the syntactical problems thereby generated. It is therefore something of a surprise, a welcome and interesting one, to find this approach explicitly suggested by St. Anselm, and to discover that he had studied in detail paradigm cases that are of a definite interest in their own right in the analysis of the syntax of agency locutions. The Anselmian approach , as I shall call it, proposes that attributions of agency, such as 'x kills y' can be analyzed out into an expression referring to an agent, a state of affairs, and an operation of "bringing about" such as 'x brings it about that y is dead'. In this paper I will undertake 1 The contents of this manuscript were first described and printed in F. S. Schmitt, Ein neues unvollendetes Werk des LI. Anselm von Canterbury, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, 3 (1936). The manuscript is reprinted in F.