Science and God

the topology of the Kantian world

Gerd Buchdahl

pp. 1-25

in: Paolo Parrini (ed), Kant and contemporary epistemology, Berlin, Springer, 1994

Abstract

Kant is known as the great mediator between opposing scientific and philosophical systems; for instance, between the Cartesians and the Leibnizians in respect of the competing notions of momentum and energy; or again, between the empiricist and rationalist tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a very similar way we find Kant attempting to mediate between sceptical and religious positions. On the one hand, he seeks to show that the traditional arguments for the existence of God, the ontological, cosmological and physico-theological proofs, cannot be sustained.Yeton the other hand, we find him simultaneously defending the language and accompanying convictions of religious consciousness. Nor is this a purely "linguistic" matter, as the reference to language might suggest. On the contrary, the imagery of a God whose purposes work themselves out in the context of the order of nature as well as of morality is for Kant an essential element through which reality is to be defined, emerging under the sovereign command of reason.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm