Kant’s Radical Critique of Ontotheology

This chapter examines the way Kant’s revolutionary theory of modality radicalizes his critique of ontotheology in the Ideal of Pure Reason. First it shows how Kant’s downgrading of his own precritical ‘only possible argument’ from an objectively valid demonstration of the real necessity of the existence of God to a subjectively valid demonstration of the necessity of assuming the idea of such a being is due to his shift from an ontological to an epistemological interpretation of the actualist principle. Second, it argues that Kant’s refutation of the traditional ontological argument in the Ideal follows a multilayered strategy, consisting of a combination of two historical lines of objection, only the second of which presupposes his negative thesis that existence is not a real predicate, as well as an additional, third objection based on his further thesis that all existential judgments are synthetic, albeit in a peculiar sense.

The Modality of Judgments

This chapter focuses on Kant’s account of the modal functions of judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason. There are two current strands of interpreting this account. The first understands the modality of a given judgment in terms of the judger’s attitude toward its content, based on their epistemic or psychological states. The second understands it solely in terms of its location in a syllogistic context. On the alternative interpretation defended in this chapter, Kant construes the modalities of judgments as instantiating relative logical modalities and expressing logical coherence relations between a judgment and a set of background judgments. This interpretation not only fits well with Kant’s revolutionary program of redefining modality as a feature of the relation between the conceptual representations of things and the cognitive faculty of the judger, but also captures the formal-logical infrastructure of his account of real modality in the rest of the Critique.

Kant and Ontotheology

This chapter examines Kant’s objection to the ontological argument, based on the thesis Kant introduces in The Only Possible Argument (1763), “Existence is not a predicate or determination of a thing” (Ak. 2:72), which means that existence cannot be contained in the intension of the concept of any object. However, the historical novelty of Kant’s conception of existence does not lie in this negative thesis but in his two positive theses, “Existence is a predicate not so much of the thing itself as of the thought which one has of the thing” (OPA, Ak. 2:72), and “Existence is the absolute positing of a thing” (OPA, Ak. 2:73). These theses point to a radical discovery: existence is to be reinterpreted as a feature of conceptual representations of things and in reference to a cognitive subject. Kant’s later realization of the groundbreaking implications of this discovery will ground his revolution in modality.

Introduction

Although interest in Kant’s views on modality has surged only recently, Kant had a great deal to say about modal notions throughout his long philosophic career, from his early works of the 1750s and 60s to his critical works. While there may also be various reasons to be interested in Kant’s recurrent discussions of modality from the viewpoint of contemporary epistemology and metaphysics of modality, as Jessica Leech and, to some extent, Nick Stang demonstrate in their works, they deserve particularly special attention from both broader historical and Kant scholarship points of view. For not only do these discussions constitute a genuine turning point in the history of modal thought, but they also provide a framework for a novel interpretation of Kant’s philosophical trajectory....

Ontotheology and Modality II

This chapter examines the prevalent conception of modality in German rationalist school, by looking at the modal version of the ontological argument, propounded by Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, and these figures’ accounts of modality in other metaphysical contexts. It disputes two claims of a common narrative concerning the school metaphysicians: (i) they were committed to logicism, according to which claims about possibility and necessity are exhaustively explained through formal-logical principles, while Kant introduced a real or metaphysical account of modality, involving extra-logical truth-makers of modal claims; (ii) they were committed to the view that existence is a real predicate or determination, which Kant strongly rejected. This chapter demonstrates that contrary to the common narrative, Leibniz and Wolff had robust conceptions of real possibility and necessity, and did not commit to the conception of existence as a distinct determination of things and even anticipated Kant’s position on existence in significant ways.

Absolute Real Modality and Kant’s Amodalism Regarding Noumena

This final chapter focuses on the two theses Kant introduces in §76 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment: the epistemic thesis that while it is a necessary feature of our discursive understanding to distinguish between the merely possible and the actual, an intuitive or divine understanding would cognize only actual objects, and the metaphysical thesis that things in themselves do not have modal properties. Both theses are rooted in Kant’s revolutionary theory of modality. Modal categories express only the various ways in which the representations of objects are related to the cognitive subject, and thus do not signify anything in isolation from this representational relation. Modalization is thus an exclusive feature of a discursive mind to which representations of objects can be related in various ways, as opposed to an intuitive mind which would represent the whole of everything all at once and thus only in one way.

Modal Categories and Kant’s Revolution

This chapter reconstructs Kant’s revolutionary account of real modality as presented in the Schematism and the Postulates chapters of the Critique. Here we find his precritical theses on existence, both negative and positive, transform into a strong ‘peculiarity’ thesis about modal categories in general: “as a determination of the object they do not add to the concept to which they are ascribed in the least, but rather express only the relation to the faculty of cognition” (A219). Each of possibility, actuality, and necessity posits the conceptual representation of an object in a different relation to the background conditions of our empirical cognition of objects. Each such act of positing constitutes a peculiar, i.e. ‘subjective,’ type of synthetic judgment, where the intension of the subject-concept is not at all enlarged, but a relation with a distinct cognitive faculty (i.e. respectively, with understanding, perception, and reason) is added to it.

The Revolutionary Shift in Kantian Modality Prior to the Critique

This chapter examines the development of Kant’s conception of modality in the period between The Only Possible Argument (1763) and the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). From the mid-1760s on, Kant interprets his discovery that existence involves a relation to the cognitive faculty as more broadly applying to modality in general, and adopts the epistemological interpretation of the actualist principle. This shift plays an essential role in Kant’s realization of the need for a ‘critical turn’ in philosophy, which Kant first formulates in his 1772 letter to Herz in terms of the question of how to cognize that our pure concepts do indeed represent really possible objects. What problematizes this question is the actualist principle, epistemologically interpreted as stating that the cognition of actuality is a prerequisite of cognition of real possibility. Kant’s emerging revolution in modality is thus constitutive of his critical turn rather than a consequence of it.

Kant’s ‘Only Possible Argument’, Possibility and Necessity

This chapter offers a reconstruction and analysis of Kant’s reformed ontological argument, moving from the actualist principle (AP) that every real possibility must be grounded in actuality to the conclusion that there exists a unique really necessary being, grounding all real possibility. This argument turns on a distinction between real modality, i.e. possibility and necessity of existence, and logical modality, i.e. possibility and necessity of thought. The existing literature on the argument focuses on the problem that the singularity of the ground of all real possibility is not warranted by the premises of the argument. There is, however, an even more fundamental problem: what grounds the actualist principle? The principle can be interpreted ontologically, as expressing the conditions of real possibility per se, or epistemologically, expressing the conditions of our cognition of real possibility. The precritical Kant adopts the ontological interpretation, but does not provide a justification for it.

Ontotheology and Modality I

This chapter offers a general framework for reading ontotheology, according to which any version of the ontological argument consists of two logical steps. First, it introduces existence into the concept of God in one way or another; second, it infers the existence of God from the concept of God and asserts identity between two distinct notions of God, viz. as the most real being and as the necessary being. With this framework in place, the chapter then examines the classical version of the ontological argument, introduced by St Anselm and popularized by Descartes. It demonstrates that while Kant’s primary objection, i.e. existence is not a real predicate, applies equally to both Anselm’s and Descartes’ arguments, Descartes importantly anticipates the actualist principle, i.e. facts about possibility must be grounded on facts about actuality, which will come to be a major insight in Kant’s theory of modality.