Kant on the cosmological argument

Abstract

The cosmological argument—or at least the version of it on which Kant focuses—employs the Principle of Sufficient Reason to argue for the existence of an absolutely necessary being from the assumption that the world exists contingently. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant contends that the argument is flawed because, in various ways, it presupposes the soundness of the ontological argument—an argument whose unsoundness he takes himself to have already demonstrated earlier in the book. In this talk I seek to throw new light on this rather poorly understood criticism. I argue that in order to see its merit we need to appreciate that Kant is following Wolff in treating the argument's key contingency assumption as the assumption that the world might have existed in some other way, rather than as the assumption that it might not have existed at all. This colloquium may not be recorded without written permission from both the speaker and the NC State Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

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