Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T13:38:51.607Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Possibility Proof is Not What Remains from Kant's Beweisgrund

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2020

Michael Oberst
Michael Oberst*
Affiliation:
Humboldt University of Berlin
*
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The so-called ‘possibility proof’ in Kant's pre-Critical Beweisgrund has been widely discussed in the literature, and it is a common view that he never really abandoned it. As I shall argue, this reading is mistaken. I aim to show that the natural illusion in the Critique of Pure Reason, which is usually taken to be the possibility proof turned into a transcendental illusion, has both a different conclusion and a different argument than the possibility proof. Rather, what remains from Beweisgrund is what I will call the ‘proof a posteriori’, which the Critique turns into a transcendental illusion that is of regulative use for reason.

Keywords

rational theologytranscendental idealregulative use of reason
Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 219 - 242
Copyright
© Kantian Review, 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abaci, Uygar (2017) ‘Kant, the Actualist Principle, and the Fate of the Only Possible Proof’. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 55, 261–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abaci, Uygar (2019) Kant's Revolutionary Theory of Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allison, Henry E. (2004) Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. Revised and enlarged edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Boehm, Omri (2014) Kant's Critique of Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chignell, Andrew (2007) ‘Belief in Kant’. Philosophical Review, 116, 323–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chignell, Andrew (2009) ‘Kant, Modality, and the Most Real Being’. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 91, 157–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chignell, Andrew (2012) ‘Kant, Real Possibility, and the Threat of Spinoza’. Mind, 121, 635–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, Mark, and Watkins, Eric (1998) ‘Kant on the Material Ground of Possibility: From “The Only Possible Argument” to the “Critique of Pure Reason”’. Review of Metaphysics, 52, 369–95.Google Scholar
Grier, Michelle (2001) Kant's Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Dieter (1960) Der ontologische Gottesbeweis: Sein Problem und seine Geschichte in der Neuzeit. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr.Google Scholar
Hoffer, Noam (2016) ‘The Relation between God and the World in the Pre-Critical Kant: Was Kant a Spinozist?’ Kantian Review, 21, 185–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffer, Noam (2019) ‘Kant's Regulative Metaphysics of God and the Systematic Lawfulness of Nature’. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 57, 217–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kanterian, Edward (2018) Kant, God and Metaphysics: The Secret Thorn. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Longuenesse, Béatrice (1998) Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longuenesse, Béatrice (2005) ‘The Transcendental Ideal and the Unity of the Critical System’. In Kant on the Human Standpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 211–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oberst, Michael (2018) ‘Kant on Contradiction, Conceptual Content, and the Ens Realissimum’. Kant Yearbook, 10, 85–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pasternack, Lawrence (2011a) ‘Regulative Principles and “the Wise Author of Nature”’. Religious Studies, 47, 411–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pasternack, Lawrence (2011b) ‘Kant's Doctrinal Belief in God’. In Thorndike, Oliver (ed.), Rethinking Kant, vol. 3 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 200–18.Google Scholar
Schmucker, Josef (1980) Die Ontotheologie des vorkritischen Kant. Berlin: de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schönfeld, Martin (2000) The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stang, Nicholas (2010) ‘Kant's Possibility Proof’. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 27, 275–99.Google Scholar
Stang, Nicholas (2016) Kant's Modal Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theis, Robert (1994) Gott: Untersuchung der Entwicklung des theologischen Diskurses in Kants Schriften zur theoretischen Philosophie bis hin zum Erscheinen der Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Stuttgart: fromann-holzboog.Google Scholar
Willaschek, Marcus (2018) Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, Allen (1978) Kant's Rational Theology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Yong, Peter (2014) ‘God, Totality and Possibility in Kant's Only Possible Argument’. Kantian Review, 19, 27–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar