The intrinsic mountain pass (Q1918413)

The Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz mountain pass lemma and Rabinowitz saddle point theorems are among the most fruitful tools in critical point theory. The present paper analyzes an abstract version of these results due to Brézis-Nirenberg, and provides generalized versions which allow new existence conditions for some semilinear elliptic boundary value problems. The present approach is compared to an earlier one of Schechter-Tintarev.