It seems that every so often in philosophy some argument widely accepted as conclusive is challenged, and those who have accepted it as well as he who originated it are alleged to have committed serious errors. Of late this sort of challenge has been levelled against Kant’s criticism of cosmological arguments, and has taken two forms. In its first form it is the claim that Kant’s criticism is irrelevant to those cosmological arguments of which Aquinas’s “third way” is paradigmatic. In (...) its second form this challenge is the claim that Kant’s criticism of such arguments is vitiated by a logical error. The first two things to be shown in this essay are that these two claims are mistaken. The re-examination of Kant’s argument involved here is important not merely because it returns Kant’s criticism to its accustomed status. It is also important because it shows two further things. One of these is not too surprising; this is that Kant’s criticism extends to attempts to prove the existence of God which do not involve the use of a scholastic or rationalist philosophical terminology. The other, however, may be fairly surprising to many; this is that Kant’s criticism equally extends to attempts to prove the existence of any ultimate source of things, no matter how un-Platonic or non-Aristotelian or “scientific” that source may be. Thus this essay shows that what Kant has given us is not merely a successful criticism of cosmological arguments to prove the existence of God, but a successful criticism of cosmological arguments. Every such argument includes an ontological one and thereby either fails or begs the question. This in turn sheds some light on why metaphysical systems and religious positions must be presented for consideration rather than proved beyond objection. (shrink)

One of the more famous criticisms of ontological arguments is that provided by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, and two of the more frequent comments on it are essentially these: Kant points out that existence is no predicate; his criticism contains several puzzling elements which can just as well be neglected, since the first point is enough. It is the intent of this paper to substantiate a protest against such analyses of Kant’s anti–ontological–arguments argument and to develop certain (...) consequences from this for current attempts to rehabilitate ontological arguments. The protest is not that such analyses are simply wrong, but that they are dangerously misleading and represent Kant’s argument as weaker than it in fact is. The substantiation is provided by the examination of the three main elements of Kant’s criticism of ontological arguments: the distinction of real and logical predicates, the analysis of uses of ‘to be’, and the discussion of concepts of possible and of actual things. The consequences for current attempted rehabilitations of ontological arguments center upon the alleged distinction of ‘existence’ and ‘necessary existence’. On the basis of the foregoing substantiation it is shown that this distinction, despite its proponents’ claims, does not make Kant’s criticism inapplicable, that the sense of ‘necessity’ remains a problem, that Kant knew quite well what he was doing in criticizing ontological arguments, and that the necessary existence allegedly proved by ontological arguments is not that which is also alleged to be religiously required. (shrink)