ABSTRACT
The theme of this book – the status of claims about God in the Critical Philosophy – gains its importance from a number of facts. One is that the Critical Philosophy displays an obvious bi-valence or paradox in its use of the concept of God. One the one hand, God and related concepts are used, appealed to and depended upon by Kant in many key passages of thought and argument. On the other hand, the Critical Philosophy tells us that we can have no knowledge of the divine nature and existence. Early on in the first Critique (in the Preface to the second edition) we encounter the famous statement concerning the notions of God, freedom and immortality: ‘I therefore had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith’ (Bxxx). We will come across many such statements to this effect as we proceed. Further, readers of the first Critique will be familiar with other passages that entail that statements about a transcendent divine being are without sense. So Kant not only denies that we can have knowledge of God; he also appears to deny that there is any meaning to talk about God. This latter point is controversial. Many commentators on Kant’s philosophical theology ignore or deliberately discount Kant’s apparent commitment to the meaninglessness of claims about transcendent entities such as God. And one can see why they do. If the interpreter of Kant on God takes this commitment seriously, then the problem of making sense of Kant’s dependence upon, and positive use of, the concept of God becomes that much more difficult.
