Publisher's Synopsis
Kant and the Order of Existence What I will be doing in this chapter is setting the philosophical stage for further discussion about existence, possibility, space and time. What I mean by that is I will first undertake a deduction to prove that change is the ultimate reason for all existence. I call that ultimate ground Protochange. For my proof, I will be using Kant's Transcendental Deduction and more importantly his section on Schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason. Ordered change has always been considered both by physicists and by philosophers to be the ultimate paradigm of the universe. One can say in a crude way that lawfulness of the universe is nothing but change brought under a certain order. A universal law is a prescription for or description of order. The first thing that strikes us as we look about the world is that there are objects like trees, stars, etc. Some of which we can touch. Some we can't. Then we observe ourselves seeing and feeling these things. We observe that we have sensation. Either way, whether they are our internal sensation or external objects, we start with the indubitable presence of something. 'There is something.' This proposition is probably the starting point for philosophy. But if we want to find a more stable ground for this proposition, we have to inquire and analyze the proposition, 'There is something.' In this proposition, we can see that there is first the positing of a 'thing' and also in the proposition there is an assertion of existence. Through analysis of this proposition, we have found ourselves with an assumption implied in this proposition and the assumption is that there is existence. Another implicit assumption in this question is that there is a thing. The two questions that face us now are: 'What is existence?' 'What is a thing?' We will slowly realize through the course of this chapter and through the course of the thesis that both to be a thing and to exist imply each other. But for now, we take up the important question of what existence is?.
