Abstract
The ontological ‘proof’ of God’s existence is an argument which best shows what the logicist fallacy is about. Kant dissolved this ‘proof’ as well as many other logicist arguments by means of his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. His presentation of that distinction has its flaws, but the distinction as such can be defended against all objections.
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Notes
- 1.
The German way of indicating the relation between a concept C and an object O, of which C is predicated, is to say that O ‘falls under’ C. Although not idiomatic in ordinary English, the influence of Frege and his translators has made it so familiar to philosophical readers that it is retained throughout in this translation.
- 2.
See Critique of Pure Reason, A599 B627.
- 3.
Nelson shows himself quite prescient here, for this was in fact done within free logic, one of the non-classical systems of logic (see e.g. Lambert 2002, Chap. 2).
- 4.
Kant’s example of a synthetic judgment or proposition, Alle Körper sind schwer, is apparently easy to translate as, ‘All bodies are heavy’. However, we must remember that Newton’s physics was always in Kant’s mind. And from this perspective a much deeper translation would be, ‘All bodies gravitate’. This is an astonishing synthetic proposition, for before Newton we did not know that gravitation was a universal phenomenon (see Nelson 1908, §6). Thus for Aristotle the heavenly bodies did not gravitate. Nonetheless, in other contexts the more usual and shallow translation is necessary, for most commentators of Kant interpret his example blandly in the sense of, ‘All (terrestrial) bodies are heavy’. See Chapter “Lecture VI” and especially Footnote 6 of that chapter for an example. The reader may incidentally notice that for Aristotle not even the bland statement was true, for he understood ‘being heavy’ as ‘moving naturally towards the centre of the universe’, and not all Aristotelian terrestrial bodies do so.
- 5.
See Critique of Pure Reason, A59 B84, A151 B190.
- 6.
References
Gutting, Gary. 2009. What philosophers know: Case studies in recent analytic philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lambert, Karel. 2002. Free logic: Selected essays. Cambridge: University Press.
Nelson, Leonard. 1908. Über das sogenannte Erkenntnisproblem [On the so-called problem of knowledge]. Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule (N.F.) 2(4): 413–818. [Reprinted in Nelson (1971–1977), vol. II, pp. 59–393].
Nelson, Leonard. 1971–1977. Gesammelte Schriften, 9 vols. Edited by Paul Bernays, Willy Eichler, Arnold Gysin, Gustav Heckmann, Grete Henry-Hermann, Fritz von Hippel, Stephan Körner, Werner Kroebel, and Gerhard Weisser. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Quine, Willard van Orman. 1951. Two dogmas of empiricism. The Philosophical Review 60(1): 20–43.
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Nelson, L. (2016). Lecture V. In: A Theory of Philosophical Fallacies. Argumentation Library, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20783-4_6
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