ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to Jonathan Edwards's aim in the second step of his metaphysics of divinity, namely ‘to prove by argumentation, not intuition, that this being must be necessarily existent’. It echoes in ‘Of Being’, in several entries of ‘Miscellanies’ and in his penultimate publication The Freedom of the Will. Edwards develops the argument by composing a hypothetical disjunction of existential propositions about being and nothing. He expresses his understanding of the relevant disjunctive proposition and outlines the overall argument in ‘Miscellanies’ no. 880 (1741): When there are two parts of a disjunction, one of them will not be and not the other, unless there be some reason why one should be rather than the other. Notice that Edwards never identifies the ambiguity of ‘or’, but always assumes that it stands in a strict and not a weak disjunctive proposition. He supposes that one part must be true and the other part must be false.
