Ivan Protopopov, Oleg Nogovitsin. The question of being in Kant’s philosophy. Vol. 4. No. 1. 2019

Publication Details

The question of being in Kant’s philosophy
Title in the language of publication: Вопрос о бытии в философии Канта
Authors:
Ivan Protopopov
PhD in Philosophy, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Humanities of the Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation.
Address: 67 Bolshaya Morskaia str., St. Petersburg, 190000, Russia.

Oleg Nogovitsin
PhD in Philosophy, Senior Researcher at the Sociological institute of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Social Sciences at the Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.
Address: 25/14 7-ya Krasnoarmeyskaya str., St. Petersburg 190005, Russia.
Issue:
P. 107–183.
Language: Russian
Document type: Research Article
DOI https://doi.org/10.31119/essephts.2019.4.1.4
 

Abstract

The paper studies the question of being in Kant’s «Critique of pure reason» and early pre-critical works in comparison with his consideration of the ontological proof of the God existence. Kant links the problem of the God existence, considered within the ontological proof, to the solution of the original philosophical question of being revealed by our reason as the basis for the existence of all other cognizable beings. But if in the “Critique of Pure Reason” Kant refuted the possibility of any justification for the God existence, considering the ontological proof, by which he understood only the Cartesian argument, untenable, then in his pre-critical work titled “The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God”, he comes to a positive justification of this possibility, formulating his own a priori proof, designated by him for the first time in history as ontological. The paper shows that the Königsberg thinker, while considering the ontological proof in his early work, reveals in fact, a different concept of God as a Supreme being than that of the “Critique of Pure Reason”: Kant links this concept exclusively to the theme of being, at the same time understanding his famous thesis about being that has the same form in both early and critical writings in a completely different way, namely, that being is not a real predicate. The internal transformation that had taken place in Kant’s understanding of being in the “Critique of Pure Reason”, which then became decisive for the entire subsequent development of Western philosophy, consists in that the being has transformed from the highest determining basis of existence of all things knowable by our mind into the existence of sensually perceived objects positioned by a man as a transcendental subject.

Keywords

Ontological proof, question of being, existence of God, Cartesian argument, possibility and actuality.

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© Ivan Protopopov, 2019  © Oleg Nogovitsin, 2019

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