display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
21 ideas
| 5633 | We don't accept duties as coming from God, but assume they are divine because they are duties [Kant] |
| Full Idea: So far as practical reason has the right to lead us, we will not hold actions to be obligatory because they are God's commands, but will rather regard them as divine commands because we are internally obligated to them. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B847/A819) | |
| A reaction: Thus Kant agrees with Plato in his response to the latter's 'Euthyphro Question' (Ideas 336 and Idea 337). |
| 8046 | We can only know we should obey God if we already have moral standards for judging God [Kant, by MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: On Kant's view it never follows that we ought to do what God commands, for we would have to know that we always ought to do what God commands, but that would need a standard of moral judgement independent of God's commands. God's commands are redundant. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785]) by Alasdair MacIntyre - After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a very powerful argument, even an undeniable one. How could you accept any authority if you didn't have some standards for accepting it, even if the standard was just to be awestruck by someone's charisma and will-power? |
| 6199 | Obligation does not rest on the existence of God, but on the autonomy of reason [Kant] |
| Full Idea: It is not to be understood that the assumption of the existence of God is necessary as a ground for all obligation in general (for this rests, as has been shown, solely on the autonomy of reason itself). | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) | |
| A reaction: This shows that Kant agrees with Plato about the Euthyphro Question - that is, they both think that morality is logically and naturally prior to any gods. I agree. Why would we admire or worship or obey gods if we didn't think they were good? |
| 3721 | We judge God to be good by a priori standards of moral perfection [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Where do we get the concept of God as the highest good? Solely from the idea of moral perfection, which reason traces a priori. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785], 408.29) |
| 5607 | Only three proofs of God: the physico-theological (evidence), the cosmological (existence), the ontological (a priori) [Kant] |
| Full Idea: There are three proofs of the existence of God: the physico-theological, the cosmological, and the ontological. There are no more of them, and there also cannot be any more. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B619/A591) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to deny this, though the 'physico-theological' group may be a sizeable family. The immediate difficulty may be that physical evidence supports something less than God, the cosmological is just speculation, and a priori proofs won't work. |
| 5609 | If 'this exists' is analytic, either the thing is a thought, or you have presupposed its existence [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If the proposition 'this thing exists' is analytic, ..then either the thought is the thing, or else you have presupposed the existence and then inferred it, which is just a miserable tautology. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B625/A597) | |
| A reaction: I love the phrase "miserable tautology"! A possible strategy is to treat God as a self-evident a priori axiom. This would not be a tautology, but it would make evidence irrelevant. This may be the strategy behind Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith'. |
| 5610 | If an existential proposition is synthetic, you must be able to cancel its predicate without contradiction [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If you concede that every existential proposition is synthetic, then how would you assert that the predicate of existence may not be cancelled without contradictions? | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B626/A598) | |
| A reaction: The point is that the Ontological Argument claims that "God does not exist" is a contradiction. Kant is echoing Hume here. The proposition that 'nothing exists' hardly sounds like a logical impossibility |
| 5611 | Being is not a real predicate, that adds something to a concept [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Being is obviously not a real predicate, i.e. a concept of something that could add to the concept of a thing. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B626/A598) | |
| A reaction: Kant's famous slogan against the Ontological Argument. The modern line is that existence is a quantifier, which stands outside a proposition, and says whether it applies to anything. It is worth considering the possibility that Kant is wrong. |
| 5612 | You add nothing to the concept of God or coins if you say they exist [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If I take God together with all his predicates (among which omnipotence belongs), and say 'God is', then I add no new predicate to the concept of God. ..A hundred actual thalers do not contain the least bit more than a hundred possible ones. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B627/A599) | |
| A reaction: Norman Malcolm claims that 'necessary existence' adds something to a concept. We can compare a concept with and without contingent existence, but the comparison is void if the existence is necessary. I love Kant's objection, though. |
| 8451 | Existence is merely derived from the word 'is' (rather than being a predicate) [Kant, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: For Kant, existence derives from a true affirmative subject-copula-predicate judgement; existence is not a real predicate, but is merely derivatively implied by the copula ('is'). | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This is Kant's understanding of 'existence is not a predicate', prior to the later move of Brentano and Frege, which places existence claims in the quantifier, which is outside the proposition. |
| 3321 | Modern logic says (with Kant) that existence is not a predicate, because it has been reclassified as a quantifier [Benardete,JA on Kant] |
| Full Idea: Kant's famous critique of the Ontological Argument that existence is not a predicate leaves one perplexed as to what it might be, but modern logic says that existence is a quantifier, not a predicate. | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: See McGinn's criticism of this in Idea 6062. |
| 13732 | Kant never denied that 'exist' could be a predicate - only that it didn't enlarge concepts [Kant, by Fitting/Mendelsohn] |
| Full Idea: Kant denied that 'exists' was a predicate that enlarged the concept; he never denied that it was a predicate. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by M Fitting/R Mendelsohn - First-Order Modal Logic 8.4 |
| 5608 | Is "This thing exists" analytic or synthetic? [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Is the proposition "This or that thing exists" an analytic or a synthetic proposition? | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B625/A597) | |
| A reaction: Quine's challenge to the analytic/synthetic distinction (e.g. Idea 1626) may spoil this question, but it seems fine ask whether we are talking about words or facts here. Once this question is asked, the Ontological Argument is in trouble. |
| 20714 | God is not proved by reason, but is a postulate of moral thinking [Kant, by Davies,B] |
| Full Idea: Kant speaks of God not as something known or proved to exist by virtue of rational argument, but as a postulate of moral reflection (that is, of 'practical reason'). | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785]) by Brian Davies - Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 9 'Morality' | |
| A reaction: Presumably it is a necessary postulate, which makes this a transcendental argument, surely? |
| 1453 | We have to postulate something outside nature which makes happiness coincide with morality [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The existence must be postulated of a cause of the whole of nature, itself distinct from nature, which contains the ground of the exact coincidence of happiness with morality. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) | |
| A reaction: I can see that we need a concept of how happiness could be made proportional to morality, but I can't make sense of the assumption that it is actually possible, and hence something must exist that would achieve it. |
| 1455 | Belief in justice requires belief in a place for justice (heaven), a time (eternity), and a cause (God) [Kant, by PG] |
| Full Idea: To believe in justice in an unjust world, you have to believe in a place of perfect justice (heaven), a time for perfect justice (eternity), and a cause of perfect justice (God). | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: Compare Boethius in Idea 5765. I can see that we might need to grasp the ideals of eternal justice in order to understand morality, but belief in their genuine possibility, or even actuality, doesn't seem to follow. |
| 5598 | If you prove God cosmologically, by a regress in the sequences of causes, you can't abandon causes at the end [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If one begins the proof cosmologically, by grounding it on the series of appearances and the regress in this series in accordance with empirical causal laws, one cannot later shift from this and go over to something which does not belong to the series | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B484/A456) | |
| A reaction: Badly expressed, but it is the idea that if you start from 'everything has a cause', you can't use it to prove the existence of an uncaused entity. Better to say: an uncaused entity is the only explanation we can imagine for a causal sequence. |
| 6205 | To know if this world must have been created by God, we would need to know all other possible worlds [Kant] |
| Full Idea: We can't infer the existence of God from knowledge of this world, because we should have to know all possible worlds in order to compare them - in short, we should have to be omniscient - in order to say that it is possible only through a God. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.VI) | |
| A reaction: A nice remark, but not wholly convincing. This argument would block all attempts to work out necessities a priori, such as those of maths and logic. Must we know all possible worlds intimately to know that 2+2 is always 4? |
| 6204 | Using God to explain nature is referring to something inconceivable to explain what is in front of you [Kant] |
| Full Idea: To have recourse to God in explaining the arrangements of nature is not a physical explanation but a confession that one has come to the end of philosophy, since one assumes something of which one has no concept to conceive what is before one's eyes. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.VI) | |
| A reaction: Hume had many objections to the design argument, some of them positively sarcastic, but none as ruthless as this, since Kant (here) seems to find God to be a totally empty concept, and hence a complete non-starter as explanation for anything. |
| 6206 | From our limited knowledge we can infer great virtues in God, but not ultimate ones [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Since we know only a small part of the world, and cannot compare it with all possible worlds, we can infer from the order, design and magnitude to a wise, beneficent and powerful Author, but not that He is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.VI) | |
| A reaction: This is very much in the spirit of David Hume, who inferred from the flaws in the world that God did not seem to be entirely competent. Hume is also more imaginative, in seeing that God might be a committee, or a hired workman. |
| 6202 | In all naturalistic concepts of God, if you remove the human qualities there is nothing left [Kant] |
| Full Idea: One can confidently challenge all pretended natural theologians to cite one single definitive attribute of their object, of which one could not irrefutably show that, when everything anthropomorphic is removed, only the word remains. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.VI) | |
| A reaction: This idea derives from Hume's very empiricist view of our understanding of God (Idea 2185), but Kant is (remarkably) more hostile than Hume, because he actually implies that most people's concept of God is totally vacuous. |