Kant's Conception Of God (e-book) (used book) | F E England | bookbook.eu

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A Critical Exposition of its Metaphysical Development together w/a Translation of the Nova Dilucidatio.
This essay follows the development of Kant's metaphysical thought w/reference to the god concept, a concept which furnishes a vantage from which to estimate the significance of changes in his philosophical outlook, while itself remaining substantially the same in content. I'll show that in his recoil from Wolffian speculative metaphysics he continued to conceive of the universe, like Leibniz, as consisting of substances whose reciprocal commercium was made possible thru common origin as essences in god's being. Tracing the emergence of those considerations which led to the critical position, I'll show that by viewing epistemology as a species of logic he was led to a confused exposition of the critical doctrine of judgment & of the categories' function. From the critical premises rightly construed, the subjectivism characteristic of a trend of his thought doesn't follow, & that what has been called his phenomenalism must be qualified. The categories will not, that is to say, evince themselves as constitutive of objects, but as interpretative principles, & the critical theory of knowledge will not render metaphysics impossible (Kant declared transcendental philosophy had for its object the founding of metaphysics), but prepare the ground for a new metaphysics.
Turning to the god concept in the critical period, I'll justify the position that his artificial deduction of the ideal of pure reason & his general formulation of the problem of the unconditioned are of minor importance, but that there's implied in the critical doctrine the conception of a necessary ground of the experiential world, that the idea of the unconditioned is logically prior to & involved in the notion of the conditioned. Further, I contend that the purposivcness which admittedly is displayed in the organic realm is unintelligible unless the mechanism of nature is grounded in a supreme intelligence, & that the facts of the moral life & obligation, presuppose a moral order, & this in turn presupposes a supreme moral personality as its ground. In conclusion, I'll argue that the ideas of reason, in so far as they are valid, aren't properly described as heuristic fictions, as he was prone to describe them, but are at their own level involved in the progressive systematisation of experience. Ideas & categories are alike metaphysically knowable. The supreme test of their validity is their indispensability. The idea of the unconditioned is shown by Kant to be indispensably involved in experience, & it was, I'll urge, largely because his judgment was influenced by a lingering adherence to Wolffian formalism & to the psychology of his day that his transcendentalism wasn't extended over the entire field of experience, & the idea of the unconditioned wasn't accepted as a metaphysical principle."--Preface (edited)