Maya Krishnan

The Critical Kant famously held that our cognition requires intuition, or essentially singular representation. Kant is also often understood as taking a dismissive attitude toward his rationalist predecessors' accounts of how we cognize singulars or individuals. In this paper, I provide a new reconstruction of Kant's account of rationalist complete concepts, which are central to the rationalist account of referring to and thus cognizing singulars. I argue that Kant took his predecessors to closely approach a viable account of cognizing singulars. The rationalist's idea of God has an important role within this account: the idea of God grounds the possibility of the rationalist's cognition of singulars. This, I argue, shows that Kant takes rational theology to perform a central function of transcendental philosophy, within the systems of his predecessors. Finally, I explain how this reading of rational singularity suggests a new understanding of Kant's account of reason. Reason is sophisticated, or naturally sensitive to the problem of how our representations can be about objects, rather than naïve, or naturally assuming that our representations simply do match up to objects.

Kant claims that his moral arguments for faith in God’s existence secure faith in a being with traditional divine properties including omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. However, it is unclear how Kant’s moral arguments attain this result. This paper presents a new interpretation of Kant’s moral arguments, the ‘grounding interpretation,’ which shows why moral faith concerns a being with the traditional divine omni-properties. It argues for a connection between moral faith and a metaphysical conception of God as the ground of possibility. While that conception has previously been associated with Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Kant’s moral arguments supply it with both a practical justification and a practical interpretation. Recognizing this point enables us to understand why Kant holds that the God of moral faith has the traditional divine properties.

In this article I argue that the Critical Kant endorses the claim that God creates the best possible world, and that this claim is best understood as committing him to the view that God creates an infinitely valuable world. Kant’s understudied Critical theory of the best possible world differs significantly from his better-known quasi-Leibnizian pre-Critical account insofar as it uses an axiological rather than ontological metric for the goodness of worlds. The axiological metric introduces unique challenges for a Kantian account of the best possible world. These challenges are in turn resolved via an infinite value interpretation.