The essay collection ‘Kant on Proofs for God’s Existence’ provides a highly needed, comprehensive analysis of the radical turns of Kant’s views on proofs for God’s existence.—In the ‘Theory of Heavens’ (1755), Kant intends to harmonize the Newtonian laws of motion with a physico-theological argument for the existence of God. But only a few years later, in the ‘Ground of Proof’ essay (1763), Kant defends an ontological (‘possibility’ or ‘modal’) argument on the basis of its logical exactitude while he praises the physico-theological argument for its beauty and appeal to the common sense. In the first ‘Critique’ (1781/7), Kant replaces traditional constitutive ontological, cosmological, and physico-theological proofs with his own regulative theoretical and moral-practical religious arguments. He continues to defend a moral argument in the second ‘Critique’ (1788). But in the third ‘Critique’ (1790), Kant reintroduces a physico-theological besides an ethicotheological argument in order to unify the critical system of philosophy. Kant develops further moral arguments and arguments from evil in the ‘Theodicy’ essay (1791) and the ‘Religion’ (1793/4), and still searches for the right kind of proof for God’s existence in the ‘Opus postumum’ (1796–1804).—Part one of this volume is dedicated to an analysis of Kant’s proofs for God’s existence in their historical order that explains which proofs Kant favors or rejects in various periods of his thought. Part two contains a systematic classification of main kinds of proof for God’s existence in Kant that outlines the argumentative structure of particular kinds of proof and discusses Kant’s potential reasons for their variations and modifications. The essay collection speaks to Kant specialists, philosophers, and theologians, but introduces the topic to non-academic readers also.
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Ina Goy, Beijing Normal University, China.
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