Whatever Happened to Kant’s Ontological Argument?

Abstract

In the New Elucidation of 1755, Kant first put forward an argument for the existence of God from the concept of possibility, seeking to demonstrate that it is impossible to think of the non-existence of that which is the ground of the possibility of things.2 He developed this argument further as the only basis for a rigorously viable proof of God in The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God (OPB) of 1763. But when he came to write the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) in 1781, Kant had apparently discarded what he had previously referred to as the one possible proof, and did not include it in the critique of the proofs of God in the Transcendental Dialectic'. The proofs that he did subject to critique in the CPR were those that he had excluded in the OPB from the realm of possible proofs. Kant's own proof is of particular interest, because it represents an 'ontological' or 'ontotheological' argument which is distinct from that of Descartes, and which for Kant does not succumb to his critique of the Cartesian argument. As has been well attested, the subject of this proof evolved from the ens realissimum of Kant's so-called 4pre-critical' thought into the transcendental ideal of