| On Kant’s hidden ambivalence toward existence in his critique of the ontological argument
To be published in Special Issue on Formal Approaches to the Ontological Argument
Giovanni Mion
The paper explores Kant’s attitude toward existence in the Critique of Pure Reason. It has two main goals: first, it argues that Kant’s criticisms of the ontological argument might be vitiated by an ambivalence toward existence, and then it attempts to provide a solution to the ambivalence in question. Finally, since my reading of Kant assumes that for him, existence is governed by the rule of existential generalization, I also prove the following biconditional: existence is not a real predicate iff existential generalization is valid.
30 July 2018
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