Baumgarten and Kant on Existence

This chapter reexamines Baumgarten’s definition of “existence” with an eye to evaluating Kant’s criticisms of this definition in his pre-Critical writings. Fugate shows that Baumgarten sharply distinguishes existence, as a specific content, from actuality, as the determination of that same content, in a way that has gone unnoticed by previous commentators. After explaining the implications of this discovery for our understanding of Baumgarten’s view of existence in general, Fugate uses it to reconstruct Baumgarten’s version of the ontological argument. Fugate highlights the originality of Baumgarten’s version of the argument vis-à-vis Wolff and argues that Baumgarten’s conception of existence allows him to avoid the objections brought forward by Kant in the Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of God’s Existence.