Kant on Rational Reference: Theology as transcendental philosophy

Abstract The Critical Kant famously held that our cognition requires intuition, or essentially singular representation. Kant is also often understood as taking a dismissive attitude toward his rationalist predecessors' accounts of how we cognize singulars or individuals. In this paper, I provide a new reconstruction of Kant's account of rationalist complete concepts, which are central to the rationalist account of referring to and thus cognizing singulars. I argue that Kant took his predecessors to closely approach a viable account of cognizing singulars. The rationalist's idea of God has an important role within this account: the idea of God grounds the possibility of the rationalist's cognition of singulars. This, I argue, shows that Kant takes rational theology to perform a central function of transcendental philosophy, within the systems of his predecessors. Finally, I explain how this reading of rational singularity suggests a new understanding of Kant's account of reason. Reason is sophisticated , or naturally sensitive to the problem of how our representations can be about objects, rather than naïve , or naturally assuming that our representations simply do match up to objects.