Talk:Anselm of Canterbury/Archive 1

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Rationalisation needed

This badly needs to be rationalised. The section on the works seems to say everything twice, as though two explanations have been placed one after the other and not integrated. I take it the first comes from the Britannica, and the second is by an American, judging from the spelling. This needs cut. --Doric Loon 21:01, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't know if it has been rationalised since, but the last few paragraphs of his biography part don't make sense to me. It requires readers to know in advance more or less the detail of the Investiture controversy, i think. for instance, why did pope Paschal exclude henry I in excommunicating kings and nobles? And therere some wrong or at least unconfirmed facts in his bio: some sources (i forgot which) say that he left home in 1057 instead of 1059, and Hopkins's Anselm of Canterbury, which you can read online, says it's 1056. and according to my Britannica 2003, he finished Cur Deus Homo? in "the village of Liberi, near Capua". I also found some others contradictory to either my Britannica or Standford Encyclopedia.

And his WRitings. I'm not a native English user, so some of my claims would be misleading. But if you look through it, youll easily find some obvious grammatical mistakes (and i don't point out which to natives). The first paragraph is too long and with grammatical mistakes makes reaading hard. YOu'll see it in the second sentence (and who is 'a schoolman' in that sentence?) And as DOric Loon says in the above, some are reiterated over and over again (especially in Cur Deus Homo arg). So 'what's the point?' goes. i think it might be convenient to divide into two - philsophical and theological influences of his. Anselm's ontological argument about the existence of GOd is highly regarded i the field of philosophy, while the other, the satisfaction theory part is not. (though I know its hard). Thanks for reading:)Hans castorp81 20:17, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Reference section

The references cited are pretty old. Saying that the best criticism of his work is a book in 1896 seems questionable. There is a much more recent set of references on Anselm in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Johnor 23:26, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Major clean-up

I've just done a major clean-up of this article. I added some much-needed section headings and paragraph breaks, removed redundant text, added links, simplified and clarified some writing (removing about 1,000 commas in the process) and generally made things clean and pretty. I'm not an Anselm scholar, so I didn't change or add any facts except in a few minor cases where I could find verification and an addition or change was needed for clarification (e.g., changing "Pope Paschal" to "Pope Paschal II"). Enjoy! KarlBunker 02:43, 15 January 2006 (UTC)