The Grounding of Positive Philosophy

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• Over time, this spirit could not content itself with that philosophical method of knowing (old metaphysics) for the very reason that the knowledge so produced was simply artificial, since the coherency it achieved was merely a coherency in our thoughts, but not in the matter itself. The path of this merely syllogistic knowing only arrived at a proposition that asserted a specific content, but not that this content itself was realized as a necessary content. Of course the conclusion can be drawn from the principle of substantiality that the phenomena and emotions of our inner life have as their base a substance that one calls the soul. (In general the old metaphysics took its objects from experience and everyday beliefs, for example, the concept of human soul; the objects were given, and it... (查看原文)

  [已注销] 2016-05-17 19:48:30

• The positive result (of Kant's critique of rational theology) was that God is not the contingent but necessary content of the final, highest idea of reason. This was not a claim of the immediately preceding metaphysics, at least, or of metaphysics in general, that is, if we do not go back to Plato and Aristotle, for whom God likewise was the necessary end. The concept of God in more recent metaphysics was at bottom just as contingent as any other concept. The positive result, though, agreed with the negative, namely, that reason cannot know the real being of God: God is merely the highest idea and precisely because of this must always remain the end that can never become the beginning and, thus, can never become the principle of a science. Or, as Kant expressed the matter, this idea always... (查看原文)

  [已注销] 2016-05-17 21:20:30