Chris L. Firestone

Kant and theology at the boundaries of reason

I. Kant, theology, and rationality Chris L. Firestone’s Kant and Theology at the Boundaries of Reason is an engaging and valiant attempt to understand and defend Kant’s philosophical theology. I say ‘valiant’ because Kant’s philosophical theology is notoriously difficult to understand. This is principally due to an apparent inconsistency between the four basic parts of his theory. Part 1. First, Kant works out a devastating logical, semantic, and epistemological critique of any possible proof for God’s existence, including the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the design argument— a.k.a. ‘the physico-theological argument’ or the teleological argument—which has the immediate further implication that any possible proof for God’s non-existence is also impossible, including the argument from evil, in either its classical metaphysical version or its more modern evidential version. More precisely, Kant argues that God’s existence or non-existence is not only unknowable but also uncognizable, although at the same time God’s existence remains thinkable. Now for Kant, ‘knowledge’ or Wissen is the same as a true belief that P which is sufficiently justified in both a subjective sense (in which case it is ‘conviction’ or Überzeugung) and also an objective or universally intersubjective sense (in which case it is ‘certainty’ or Gewissheit) (CPR A822/B850). Apart from justification, knowledge also has two further substantive necessary conditions, namely (i) truth or ‘objective reality,’ which is the formal correspondence of a cognition with an actual or real-world object, and (ii) empirical meaningfulness or ‘objective validity,’ which is the necessary relatedness of any cognition to direct, non-conceptual sensory acquaintances or encounters with real individual worldly objects, i.e., ‘empirical intuitions’ (empirischen Anschauungen). By sharp contrast to knowledge, ‘cognition’ or Erkenntnis is either (1) according to the very