Aquinas and Kant on existence

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I am encountering Kant’s assertion that “existence is not a predicate” for the first time. I’m considering this in relation to Aquinas’ conception of God whose essence is existence. In light of these two approaches does calling a red apple a red existing apple add anything to the explanation? Thanks in advance… happy to clarify if needed.
 
It sound too deep for most of us. That’s probably why you don’t have many replies. I personally think that a red apple would mean that we see a red apple in our world. Whether the apple exists, we assume it. A red existing apple emphasises on existence of the apple and you want to tell people that the apple really exists. Most of us take it for granted. But some philosophers claim that the real apple is in another world. What we see is a representation.

From the religious perspective, it would not be too interested in the existence of an apple. It’s more about God’s existence, the God of the bible, we want to proclaim to the world.
 
It has been like 45 years since I read any Kant. What does he mean by, “existence is not a predicate”?
 
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My understanding is that he means that by saying something exists it doesn’t actually add anything to what it is. So if you look at a red apple it doesn’t help (conceptually) to say anything about it existing because its existence is implied. The ultimate idea being that if we are able to speak about the properties of a thing at all it is already implied that the thing exists. In other words, a thing cannot have existence as a property added to it, to say anything about it already denotes its existence.
 
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If I say, “I am thinking of a red apple” but I am thinking not of any real apple that I have seen, but an imaginary one, there is indeed difference.
 
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I tend to agree with you, Kei. Although, I am wondering how Kant deals with imaginary ideas. For example, you thinking of an apple doesn’t actually produce a real apple. You are abstracting from the reality to the accidents and essence of its appleness. But as we know there is not some form of appleness out in the ether. Appleness is a trait that only truly exists in the individual, particular existence of an apple? So I wonder if he is trying to get at the idea that any essence we are able to imagine makes no sense apart from something that actually exists? Not sure… Kant is tough.
 
That seems obvious. Does it not? What does it mean to add to the existence of something?
 
Ultimately, if Kant is right I anticipate an issue with Aquinas’ idea that God’s essence is existence or that this essence is the ground of all things’ contingency?
 
Kant’s assertion that existence is not predicative is not new. It is, in fact, a reformulation of Parmenides’s famous postulation in the inverse. He said that it is impossible to speak of something which does not exist. Plato, Aristotle and eventually Aquinas refute this. Aquinas states that there are things which can be thought of which do not possess existence. While Plato and Aristotle use Forms and Prime Matter to disprove this theory, Aquinas uses Existance and Accidents to disprove this by stating that ideas are man-made intellectual constructs of composite of accidents with no existence apart from the thinker’s own. Thus you can speak of a specific red apple which is held in ths imagination without that apple having existence apart from the thinker.

To my knowledge, Kant widely avoids imagination in the context of the creation of a new thought from the perception of existing accidents. It almost seems deliberate that he totally redefines imagination in order to avoid this. Kant simply states that imagination has nothing to do with the formulation of ideas, but simply calling up the image in the mind of something formerly perceived.

It almost seems that Kant denies the possibility of man to create ideas in the imagination as Aquinas describes it as all knowledge must come a posteriori from experiences of specific things.Thus, you cannot have thoughts about something which you don’t already have experience of.

In many of my classes, when Kant and Aquinas are compared with regards to this subject, it was the general consensus that Kant’s argument had a glaring hole in it.
 
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Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for discussion on. I appreciate it.
 
I am not a student of Kant, and i have not studied him. So i can’t say much about his questions of predicates.

But If i see an apple, i don’t just see a nature, i also see a nature that exists; it is the difference between something potentially real and actually real. This could mean only two things. The apples nature is identical with its existence, it exists because it is an apple, because that’s what it is to be an apple, to exist as one. This is clearly not the case since we see apples begin to be apples and thus the act of existing cannot be reduced to the intrinsic nature of the apple, so something more is happening to the apple than simply it’s nature.

The only other possibility is that existence is something given. The apple was only potential and then that potential was actualized by something that was already actual, or existing. If the apple has been given existence then that would mean that the act of existing is not intrinsic to the apples nature and thus there is necessarily a distinction between the nature of the apple and the act of its existing even when it exists. In other-words Its nature is to be an apple, but it’s nature cannot be consider as that which exists because it is an apple. So the concept of existence cannot simply be the nature of the apple. Existence must be something more than that.

So we cannot think of existence as merely a predicate or as something that is merely descriptive of what a potential nature is once it is actual. Every time a thing begins to exist there is a relationship at work.

This distinction between a things nature and its act of existing cannot regress infinitely. You will have to posit a nature that is existence, a being whose nature is to exist in order to explain why a potential or possible being can become actual and remain actual at any point. Thus it is correct to say that God is existence.

This is all logically necessary. So if Kant is saying that existence is not a nature, he is wrong. Existence is a nature, and that nature makes other natures exist. These natures that begin to exist, exist only analogously in the respect that they are being caused to exist and are being sustained in existence rather than existence being something that they are by nature. They have there own act, but that act is their nature alone and is not that by which they exist. Their nature is being made real by God.
 
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Not to derail the thread but what about Heidegger and his whole thing with Being. I could never find a good summary.
 
Sorry, but I’ve got no clue on Heidegger. I pretty much stopped in-depth study of modern philosophy (not to mention post-modern or contemporary) after Nietzche and what little I know about Phenomenology is through St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and she initially bases her Christian phenomenology in Finite and Eternal Being on Aquinas’s concepts of Act and Potency.
 
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dcs6f4 said:
I am encountering Kant’s assertion that “existence is not a predicate” for the first time. I’m considering this in relation to Aquinas’ conception of God whose essence is existence. In light of these two approaches does calling a red apple a red existing apple add anything to the explanation? Thanks in advance… happy to clarify if needed.
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Perhaps a link to that extract of “Critique of Pure Reason” (http://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/articles/kantexistence-a.pdf) would be useful…

The main Kant’s argument uses “One hundred dollars”. I suppose that it might be possible to translate it into Thomistic terminology, as saying that if we had an essence of “One hundred dollars” and added existence into it, we’d get something other than essence of “One hundred dollars” (or else addition changed nothing).

I guess it might end up being a very confused way of arguing in favour of real distinction between essence and existence, in favour of “One hundred dollars” not existing necessarily…

The problem seems to happen when Kant does not leave himself a way to find out that God’s existence is His essence…

I’ll also add links to some related blog posts:
 
Hi dcs6f4 and all,

Kant’s assertion that existence is not a predicate is made in that part of his Critique of Pure Reason where he tries to establish the impossibility of an ontological proof for God’s existence. He was attacking Descartes’ version of the OA which defined God as the absolutely perfect being with existence being included as one of God’s perfections. So just like I can’t conceive of a triangle except as a 3 sided figure with internal angles adding up to 180 degrees, I cannot conceive of God as something without existence.

Kant basically had 3 responses to Descartes. First, while I contradict myself if I accept the definition of a triangle but deny that it has 3 sides, I do not contradict myself if I reject the definition together with its 3 sides. The same applies to God. I just reject the definition of God as an absolutely perfect being whose perfections include existence.

Second, Kant argued that all existential propositions such as “God exists” are synthetic and not analytic. Analytic statements are true by definition and are logically necessary. However, if we posit the existence of any given thing, even God, that proposition can only be contingently true.

Finally, Kant argued that existence is not a predicate; that is, it is not the concept of something which can be added to a thing.

All of Kant’s objections are controversial, even among modern skeptics with an analytic bent. (See Hick, Mackie, and Oppy, for example.)
 
I’ll just stick with the scriptures. God himself, out of all of the things he could say, decided to give the name “I am that I am”, and also YHVH, which comes from the verb “to be”. It’s very much instrinsic to who God is.
 
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