But if the logical form of the ontological argument is such that arguments of precisely the same form generate contradictions, then the ontological argument must be unsound.
Immanuel Kant, the father of critical philosophy, in order to show the inadequacy of pure reason in the field of metaphysics, employed the word antinomies in elaborating his doctrine that pure reason generates contradictions in seeking to grasp the unconditioned.
As in the case of Sense-certainty, here in the case of Perception, by following the protagonist consciousness's efforts to make this implicit criterion explicit, we see how the criterion generates contradictions that eventually undermine it as a criterion for certainty.
The rejection of Transcendental Idealism requires Strawson to scrutinize Kant's arguments for it, and he very carefully and sympathetically analyses, and of course rejects, Kant's arguments about space and time, and geometry, and also the argument, presented in the Antinomies, that transcendental realism generates contradictions.
McTaggart argues for premise (3) by attempting to demonstrate that the existence of the A-series would generate a contradiction.
Briefly, Gödel argues that Carnap can treat arithmetic as fixed by convention only if he shows that the relevant convention does not generate a contradiction.
(A VI iv 758/LLP 61) And an impossibility, not surprisingly, is defined as a proposition that can be demonstrated to generate a contradiction in its analysis.
Since A b ≠ 0, then we have b ≠ 0 and θ 0 ≠ 0. This will generate a contradiction because A does not have nonzero eigenvalues.
In other words, respect for Humanity as an end in itself could never lead you to act on maxims that would generate a contradiction when universalized, and vice versa.
He is interested in the coherence of a theory that describes all imaginable cases and not in one that describes only observable phenomena; to be imaginable means to be possible, i.e., not to generate a contradiction.
