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A question over Kant’s passages:   . . . . I would have hope…

A question over Kant’s passages:   . . . . I would have hoped to obliterate this deep-thinking nonsense in a direct manner, through a precise account of the concept of existence, if I hadn’t found that the illusion created by confusing a •logical predicate with a •real predicate (i.e. a predicate that characterizes a thing) is almost beyond correction. Anything we please can be made to serve as a logical predicate; the subject can even be predicated of itself; for logic abstracts from all content. But a characterizing predicate is one that is added to the concept of the subject and fills it out. So it mustn’t be already contained in that concept. Obviously, ‘being’ isn’t a real predicate; i.e. it’s not a concept of something that could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain state or property. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment. The proposition ‘God is omnipotent’ contains two concepts, each with its object—God and omnipotence. The little word ‘is’ doesn’t add a new predicate but only serves to posit the predicate in its relation to the subject. If I now take the subject (God) with all its predicates (omnipotence among them), and say ‘God is’, or ‘There is a God’, I’m not attaching any new predicate to the concept of God, but only positing the subject with all its predicates, positing the object in relation to my concept. The content of both ·object and concept· must be exactly the same: the concept expresses a possibility, and when I have the thought that its object exists I don’t add anything to it; the real contains no more than the merely possible. A hundred •real dollars don’t contain a cent more than a hundred •possible dollars. If there were something in the real dollars that isn’t present in the possible ones, that would mean that the concept hundred dollars wasn’t adequate because it didn’t capture everything that is the case regarding the hundred dollars. A hundred real dollars have a different effect on my financial position from the effect of the mere concept of them (i.e. of their possibility). For the existing object isn’t analytically contained in my concept; it is added to my concept. . . .; and yet the conceived hundred dollars are not themselves increased through thus acquiring existence outside my concept. When I think of a thing through some or all its predicates, I don’t make the slightest addition to the thing when I declare that this thing is, i.e. that it exists. If this were wrong— i.e. if saying that the thing exists were characterizing it more fully than my concept did—then what I was saying exists wouldn’t be exactly what in my concept I had been thinking of as possible. If I have the thought of something that has every reality except one, the missing reality isn’t added by my saying that this defective thing exists. On the contrary, it exists with something missing, just as I have thought of it as having something missing; otherwise the existing thing would be different from the one thought of through my concept. Descartes says that God must necessarily exist because existence is grounded in God’s essence (just as being omnipotent is grounded in God’s essence).  In response to Descartes’ Ontological argument, Kant is saying:

Essay Section 2: (Answer ALL parts of this essay) Worth 35 p…

Essay Section 2: (Answer ALL parts of this essay) Worth 35 points.   1. In your own words fully explain Anselm’s Ontological argument for God’s existence step by step. How exactly is it that he thinks he can prove that an ACTUAL God exists from just the mere IDEA of God? Explain the logical thought process of this argument step by step and in detail. (You may bring Descartes’ Ontological Argument into this if you want). Make sure you illustrate your points with your own examples.  As part of your explanation, make sure to explain why the Ontological Argument can be used with the idea of God, but NOT with something like the “perfect ice-cream cone”.   2. How does this sort of argument differ from an a posteriori approach like the Cosmological or Teleological arguments?   3. Explain in your own words and in detail BOTH of Kant’s criticisms to the Ontological Argument that “Existence is not a predicate”. Make sure you fully explain exactly how these criticisms affect the Ontological argument. Give your own examples.