Résumés of the works

Summary

NEW ELUCIDATION

Kant's New Elucidation (1755) consists of three sections. Section 1, which contains Propositions I–III, rejects the claim that the ultimate principle of all truth is the Law of Contradiction, arguing that affirmative and negative truths require separate principles (What is, is and What is not, is not), which together constitute the Principle of Identity, which takes priority over the Principle of Contradiction. Section 2, which contains Propositions IV–XI, defines the principle of the determining ground (the Principle of Sufficient Reason). Kant distinguishes antecedently and consequentially determining grounds (the former including the ground why, the ground of being, and the ground of becoming; the latter being the ground of knowing). In Proposition V, Kant maintains that nothing is true without a determining ground. In Proposition VI, he attacks the idea that a being can contain the ground of its own being within itself, criticising the Cartesian version of the ontological proof of God's existence (though not on the grounds that existence is not a predicate), and he offers in Proposition VII a proof of God's existence from the possibility both of God Himself and of all other things. All beings which exist contingently (that is to say, all beings apart from God) must have an antecedently determining ground of existence (Proposition VIII). Proposition IX discusses Crusius's objection that the thesis just maintained involves fatalism; Kant's reply consists in a compatibilist defence of freedom. Propositions X and XI, respectively, state the genuine and the spurious corollaries of the principle stated in Proposition VIII, and include an attack on the Leibnizian principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. Section 3, which contains Propositions XII and XIII, presents a statement of the Principle of Succession (substances are capable of change only in so far as they are dynamically and reciprocally related to one another, from which a proof of the existence of the external world is derived), and of the Principle of Co-existence (such a dynamic and reciprocal relation does not arise from the mere existence of substances alone but is possible only through the common principle of their being, the Divine Intellect, thinking them in a systematic and dynamic schema; from this a proof of the existence of God is derived).