The Doctrine of Self-positing and Receptivity in Kant's Late ...

of this ideal and its final personification. Reason moves from an idea or concept (logical
possibility) to the necessary existence of a transcendent entity. However, an earlier
critical problem was at the very start of its inquiry into the conditions for the possibility
of particular beings or things, instead of limiting itself to the objective cognitions of the
subject in experience.
Without going any further, it is worth returning briefly to the differences in the
principles of determinations between BDG and this section of the KRV. To account for
the possibility of things or Dasein is ultimately to show that the conditions for the
possibility of these things are themselves necessary. When this is done by attending to
the material aspect of Setzung, the key is to show that a synthesis in the unity of the
predicates that determine a particular position is really possible. In other words, out of
what necessity can the possibility of an actually existing subject – a posited entity – be
explained, so that one can get at the truth of what it is.
In BDG such an account was developed out of a concept of inner possibility that
contained a formal and a material element. Ultimately, the conditions for fulfilling these
were thinking in general (principle of contradiction) and the real conditions for actual
thinking (data – something actual – for thinking the predicates of the non-contradictory
proposition). Since that which cancels all possibility (contradiction and unthinkability) is
impossible (qua concept of possibility), then inner possibility must necessarily be
possible. And, knowing that it requires data as a condition for thought, something must
have absolute existence.
From this summary of the main idea argument in BDG, it is possible to see here
that, contrary to the later warning of the KrV, Kant‘s early ontological proof begins from
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