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Kant on the relation between the cosmological and ontological arguments

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Notes

  1. Immanuel Kant,Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London, 1958), B634.

  2. Bertrand Russell,A History of Western Philosophy (New York 1945), pp. 587–588.

  3. Russell is not the only writer on the cosmological argument who thinks there is something superfluous about using a posteriori considerations to prove the existence of a necessary being. See, for example, H.J. Paton,The Modern Predicament (London, 1955), pp. 199–200, and Patterson Brown, “St. Thomas' Doctrine of Necessary Being”,The Philosophical Review, 73.1 (January, 1964): 78. However, these writers, unlike Russell, do not attribute such a claim to Kant.

  4. See Brown, op. cit., pp. 76–90.

  5. For a thorough and illuminating discussion of the differences between the cosmological arguments of Leibniz and Clarke and those of Aquinas and Duns Scotus, see William L. Rowe,The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, 1975), chs. I and II.

  6. See Kant'sLogic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz (Dover edition, New York, 1988), p. 124.

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  7. See Peter Remnant, “Kant and the Cosmological Argument”,The Australasian Journal of Philosophy 37.2 (August, 1959): 152–155, reprinted in T. Penelhum and J.J. MacIntosh, eds.,The First Critique (Belmont, California, 1969), pp. 143–146. See also Allen W. Wood,Kant's Rational Theology (Ithaca, 1978), pp. 126–127.

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  8. Step (3) can be defended if we suppose that there can be only oneens realissimum. For a reconstruction, in this vein, of Kant's grounds for (3), see Wood, op. cit., pp. 125–126.

  9. The point in this paragraph is well-made by Rowe, op. cit., pp. 196–197, in reconstructing Samuel Clarke's objection to the ontological argument.

  10. Some commentators suggest that the cosmological arguer, in order to escape the Dependency Argument, should reject the ontological argument in just this way, i.e., by maintaining that (i) does not entail (ii), — apparently not seeing that such an objection is not available to those who hold that (ii) is true. See, for example, Jonathan Bennett,Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge, 1974), p. 252; and Wood, op. cit., pp. 129–130 in conjunction with pp. 112–114. InThe Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982), pp. 82–84, J.L. Mackie (whose discussion is somewhat compressed and difficult to interpret) apparently sees that the cosmological arguer cannot reject the ontological argument in this way, but seems to suggest that this insight supports Kant's claim about the dependency of the one argument on the other. Such a suggestion is mistaken: Kant will not be vindicated so long as the epistemic sort of criticism of the ontological argument, rehearsed in the text, is tenable.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of California, 93106-3090, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    J. William Forgie

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Forgie, J.W. Kant on the relation between the cosmological and ontological arguments. Int J Philos Relig 34, 1–12 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01316976

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