Kant and the miserable tautologies of existence

FERREIRO, HÉCTOR

Buenos Aires

Simposio; VIII Simposio Internacional sobre Filosofía Clásica Alemana; 2022

Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina - FILORED

In the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant evaluates the possibility that existential judgments are analytic. Kant considers that those who defend such an interpretation of existential judgments are obliged to hold that the thought of the thing they judge to exist is the existing thing itself and that, if they are not willing to subscribe to this thesis, what they in practice do is to presuppose existence as belonging to the thought of a possible thing and only pretend that they infer it from that thought, when in fact -unknowingly or surreptitiously - they have already adscribed it to the thought of the thing as a merely possible thing. Kant´s line of reasoning contains, however, two problematic claims, namely, the thesis that an analytic judgment, that is to say, a judgment in which the predicate is implied in the concept of the subject, is for that very reason a tautology, and the thesis that thought cannot be the thing itself. In my talk I will seek to show that both theses are far less convincing than Kant claims.