How did Immanuel Kant disprove the ontological argument?
Well, well, well. Having just finished my A Level Philosophy, I didn’t think I would be answering a question like this so soon. Let me run the ontological argument for you to set the scene. The argument is as follows: God is supremely perfect being. A supremely perfect being contains all perfections. It is more perfect to exist is reality and mind than the mind alone. Therefore, existence (in reality) is a perfection. Therefore, God must exist. But Kant argued that this argument fails by saying that existence is not a perfection because it is not a predicate (his term for what we now call a property). He claimed that things do “have” existence in the same way they “have” other properties. To say that the concept of God contains the idea of existence is a mistake. Existence adds nothing to a concept itself: to say something exists is to say that some object corresponds. He illustrates this (shows what he means) by asking us to imagine 100 “Thalers” (coins of his time). We could, for exa
