Positing or Predicating? Existence after Kant

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Many central philosophical issues concern the existence of things of certain kinds. In other words, we try to get clear whether numbers exist or not, whether properties exist or not and so one. At the same time existence is a puzzling property: it seems not to qualify or determine things further like, for instance, the property of being red does. Given, on the one hand, its fundamental importance and, on the other, its puzzling character it is unsurprising that philosophers have theorized about existence since antiquity. Kant's take on existence is generally seen as a paradigm change in the history of thinking about this concept. The discussion of Kant's innovation focused so far almost exclusively on Frege, Russell, Quine and their followers and ignored 19th century contributions that worked out Kant's thought in radically different and fruitful ways. Our project intends to change this situation. We will explore the most important 19th century constructive responses to Kant's view of existence and thereby provide a better understanding of the Kantian paradigm change as well as gain new insights into existence. We will argue that the 19th century engagement with Kant adds something new to contemporary work on existence and can be compared and contrasted in fruitful ways with it.