Uygar Abaci

Andrew Chignell recently proposed an original reconstruction of Kant's ‘Only Possible Argument’ for the existence of God. Chignell claims that what motivates the ‘Grounding Premise’ of Kant's proof, ‘real possibility must be grounded in actuality’, is the requirement that the predicates of a really possible thing must be ‘really harmonious’, i.e. compatible in an extra-logical or metaphysical sense. I take issue with Chignell's reconstruction. First, the pre-Critical Kant does not present ‘real harmony’ as a general condition of real possibility. Second, the real harmony requirement is not what motivates the ‘Grounding Premise’ of the proof. Instead, this premise is sufficiently motivated by what Chignell labels the ‘content’ requirement. Finally, Kant's downgrading of the proof in his Critical period is not based on a concern regarding the real harmony of the predicates of God, but on his Critical restrictions on cognition in general and modal cognition in particular.

one important product of kant's pre-critical metaphysics is the proof of God's existence that he presented in The Only Possible Argument of 1763.1 Kant's proof moves from what I will call here the 'actualist principle', every real possibility must be grounded in actuality, to the conclusion that there exists a unique necessary being, i.e. an ens realissimum, which grounds all real possibility. The pre-critical proof deserves interest in its own right, for not only does it have an intriguing logical structure, but it also allows us to observe Kant's first elaborate discussion of modal concepts. However, what has attracted particular scholarly attention in the last few decades is the perplexing attitude...

Kant states in §76 of the third Critique that the divine intuitive intellect would not represent modal distinctions. Kohl and Stang claim that this statement entails that noumena lack modal properties, which, in turn, conflicts with Kant’s attribution of contingency to human noumenal wills. They both propose resolutions to this conflict based on conjectures regarding how God might non-modally represent what our discursive intellects represent as modally determined. I argue that these proposals fail; the viable resolution consists in recognizing that we modalize human noumenal wills as a merely regulative-practical principle in our judgements of imputation.

RÉSUMÉLes tentatives existantes dans la littérature de réfuter l'argument de la plus grande difficulté dans leParménideont surtout entrepris de nier le parallélisme entre les relations de typeprosentre les Formes et celles entre les particuliers. Par contre, ces tentatives sont insatisfaisantes, parce que l'argument peut mener à sa conclusion selon laquelle on ne peut connaître les Formes sans s'appuyer sur ce parallélisme. Je soutiens qu'une stratégie plus efficace consiste à nier la prémisse plus essentielle selon laquelle la relation objet-connaissance est une relation de typepros. Cette prémisse est fausse parce que les relations de typeprosrequièrent une codépendance définitionnelle et ontologique entre les relata, et la relation objet-connaissance ne satisfait pas à cette condition de réciprocité.