Proof by Anselm: The Breathtaking Bovine & How to Prove Numerous Other Things

I invite you to join me in celebrating the contributions of Anselm to philosophical argument. I begin with a thought experiment:

Imagine with me a cow so beautiful that there is most certainly nothing more beautiful than said cow. We must agree that this breathtaking bovine exists in your mind as well as in mine now. And we can agree that, in our own subjective right, the cow we are imagining is the most beautiful there is because I have said to think so. While we might conjure different elementary images of such a cow, we have already granted it the property of being of utmost beauty. A beautiful cow in our mind and present in our world is even the more beautiful for that we can appreciate it with our eyes. If our bovine exists only in our mind, then we can conceive of a more beautiful bovine in reality. But we cannot imagine a more beautiful cow than the one I instructed you to because we agreed it to be the most beautiful. Therefore, the breathtaking bovine for which there are no more beautiful bovines must exist.

Anselm has given us the means to prove an infinite set of things! Please feel free to use the following strategy to conduct a proof by Anselm:

1. Start with an assumption that is agreeable to you and your audience alike. This can be a definition such as the most beautiful cow. It must be an assumption that grants the thing you wish to prove the existence of an unsurpassable quality. Remember that your audience must agree with you on this.

2. Suggest your audience conceive of the thing you wish to prove in their mind and that they grant their conception this quality you agree that it has.

3. Enforce to your audience the fact that now the thing exists in their mind.

4. Suggest a thing exactly as your audience is now imagining that exists in reality.

5. Inform them that that is a thing whose aforementioned quality surpasses that which they imagined to possess - because it is real. Their conceived version, thusly, is inferior to this new thing.

6. Now the thing that existed in your audience's minds must not only exist in their minds but also in reality for it is there that it achieves its unsurpassable quality.

And so I urge you, go forth and change the world with logic!