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Routledge
444 pages
Kant is widely acknowledged as the greatest philosopher of modern times. He undertook his famous critical turn to save human freedom and morality from the challenge of determinism and materialism. Intertwined with his metaphysical interests, however, he also had theological commitments, which have received insufficient attention. He believed that man is a fallen creature and in need of ‘redemption’. He intended to provide a fortress protecting religious faith from the failure of rationalist metaphysics, from the atheistic strands of the Enlightenment, from the new mathematical science of nature, and from the dilemmas of Christian theology itself. Kant was an epistemologist, a philosopher of mind, a metaphysician of experience, an ethicist and a philosopher of religion. But all this was sustained by his religious faith.
This book aims to recover the focal point and inner contradictions of his thought, the ‘secret thorn’ of his metaphysics (as Heidegger once put it). It first locates Kant in the tradition of reflection on the human weakness from Luther to Hume, and then engages in a critical, but charitable, manner with Kant’s entire pre-critical work, including his posthumous fragments. Special attention is given to The Only Possible Ground (1763), one of the most difficult, interesting and underestimated of Kant’s works. The present book takes its cue from an older approach to Kant, but also engages with recent Anglophone and continental scholarship, and deploys modern analytical tools to make sense of Kant. What emerges is an innovative and thought-provoking interpretation of Kant’s metaphysics, set against the background of forgotten religious aspects of European philosophy.
"Its impressive scholarship and thought-provoking claims make this a must-read for anybody with an interest in Kant, his ideas and his age." - Jack Herbert, British Journal for the History of Philosophy
"[E]xtraordinarily rich and useful … [This] book should take its place alongside other major studies of Kant's pre-critical development in English … [R]eaders with a particular interest in religious themes in Kant's pre-critical philosophy will find here an exhaustive presentation and discussion of not only published texts related to those themes but also unpublished Reflexionen and letters. … Kanterian's book deserves much praise for showing the centrality of religious and theological themes in Kant's pre-critical works and generally in the debates in early modern metaphysics that Kant engaged with." - Michael Rohlf, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
"This seminal work integrates Kant's approach to the most profound questions. His thought is historically and conceptually situated in a manner at once analytically rich and entirely accessible. A "must read" for students and teachers of Kantian philosophy." - Dan Robinson, University of Oxford, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One: From Luther to Hume – the Weakness Motif in the Tradition
Introduction
1.1 The First Circle: The Certainty of Salvation
Erasmus
Luther
The Problem of Evidence
Further Developments
1.2 The Second Circle: The Rise of Protestant Orthodoxy
Securing Faith
The Return of Aristotle
Further Developments
1.3 The Third Circle: The New Science and its Philosophy
From Copernicus to Montaigne
Descartes
The Reaction to Descartes
Spinoza
Further Developments
Pascal and Bayle
1.4 The Fourth Circle: Triumph and Peril of Reason
Newton
Leibniz
Pietism and Thomasius
Wolff
Boyle and Locke
English Deism, Hume and French Atheism
1.5 Conclusion
Chapter Two: The Early Works
2.1 Introduction
2.2 The Beginning: Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces
2.2 God’s Glory: The Universal Natural History
The Character of the Work
Cosmology and Cosmogony: Kant’s Celestial Mechanics
Physico-theology: God and His Creation
The Abyss and the Sinking
Religion and Science: Some Predecessors
The Central Motifs
Anxiety, Fallenness, Faith and Revelation
The Chain of Creation: Glory and Vanity
The Human Fate
The Holy in Kant
2.3 From Physico-Theology to Onto-Theology: The New Elucidation
The Principle of Sufficient Ground
The Theological Argument
Sin and Free Will
More on the Principle of Determining Ground
Causation and God
2.4 The Modal Argument in the New Elucidation
Kant’s Modal Argument
Baumgarten’s Metaphysics of Possibility
Fragment R3733
Conclusion
Chapter Three: Intermission – The Period 1756-1762
3.1 The Physical Monadology, the New Theory of Motion, and the False Subtlety Essay
3.2 The Question of Optimism
The Optimism Essay
The Funk Essay
Two Optimism Models: Pope and Spalding
Crusius’s Optimism
Fragments R3704 and R3705
Chapter Four: The First Fortress: The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of the Existence of God
4.1 Preliminary: The Frailty of Theory
4.2 Existence
Existence is not a Predicate, but Absolute Position
Existence Goes Beyond Possibility
Discussion of Kant’s Thesis about Existence
An Objection
Discussion Continued
4.3 Possibility
A Digression: Actualism
The Impossibility of no Possibility
Formalising Kant’s Argument
Another Formal Attempt
The Modal Principle Again
The Necessary Being
The Uniqueness Of the Necessary Being
Simplicity and Uniqueness
Immutability and Eternity
The Highest Being
The Theistic Property: Personhood
Perfection
The Status of the Modal Argument
4.4 Physico-Theology, Naïve and Improved
Life and the Supernatural
Miracles
Naïve Physico-theology
The Question of Certainty
Three Objections to Naïve Physics-Theology
Improved Physico-theology
All-sufficiency
4.5 Conclusion: The Status of Onto-Theology
Chapter Five: First Cracks in the Wall
5.1 Introduction
5.2 The Prize Essay
Mathematics versus Philosophy
Certainty in Philosophy and the Newtonian Model
Certainty in Metaphysics
Certainty in Theology
5.3 Negative Magnitudes
Chapter Six: The ‘Sceptical’ Period
6.1 The Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
6.2 The Remarks on the Observations and Rousseau’s Influence
6.3 Turning Against Metaphysics: The Mid-1760s
Two Notions of Metaphysics
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
The Concept of a Spirit
The Immaterial Realm
Morality
Towards a Logic of Philosophical Illusion
A Theoretical Conclusion
The Limits of Knowledge and Moral Faith
Chapter Seven: Religious Roots and Sources of the Critical Turn
7.1 God and Metaphysics in the Reflexionen of 1760-1768
7.2 The Antinomial Structure of Reason: Theological Roots and Models
7.3 Kant’s Theological Teachers: Knutzen and Schultz
7.4 The Humean Model
7.5 New Building Blocks: the Reflexionen in 1769
The Antinomies and the Weakness Motif
Further Reflections on Reason’s Weakness
The Void
The World
God
Epilogue: An Unfinished Drama
Appendix
Literature
Index
