Analytic judgement and synthetic judgment: how can we think of existence and God?

INTRODUCTION

Greek philosophy opened doors to a particular way of thinking that provided roots for
the western intellectual tradition. The idea of God has always been the preoccupation of
philosophers from ancient time till modern period. For Kant you should pass through the
analytic judgement and the synthetic judgement. A judgement is said to be analytic if the
predicate belongs to the subject and it is synthetic if the predicate lies outside de subject. 1
Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg and became a great thinker and lived a self-disciplined
life. Here we are at the modern period where knowledge was theoretical.

There has always been a confusion to talk about existence and God. From this there
has been tension for each group of philosophers wanted to arrive at the knowledge of God.
For the rationalist like Leibniz and Christian Wolf propagate that we can know God through
reason for the empiricist like John Locke and David Hume stand for the fact that we can have
knowledge of God through experience. But later on Kant saw a limit to this he says we need
to put reason into court in which our reason will be disciplined. He left from metaphysics
generalis which he said it has failed and its limited in that, the traditional metaphysics limit
our human reason for it says we can only arrive at the knowledge of the phenomena that is the
knowledge of things as they appear out of that we cannot know nothing else. to special
metaphysics where he says that our reason cannot be that limited that even though we cannot
not really come to know God who is the noumen but then we can at least think of God who is
and His existence is in His essence we cannot separate existence from God to talk of God is to
say he exist. For this Kant makes a distinction between the phenomena from the noumen. He
published his first work in 1763 Unique fondements possible pour une demonstration de l
existence de Dieu and later the critique on Pure Reason in 1781. What is the difference Kant
makes in the analytical and the synthetic judgement? And in which want can we talk about the
existence of God? To give an answer to these questions we are going to divide our work into
two parts: the first will focus on the differences between the analytical judgement and the
synthetic judgement and the second part will be how we can think of existence and God. Then
we will draw our conclusion.

1
Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la Raison Pure, Quadrige, Presses Universitaire de France, Paris, 1944, 37.
 I THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SYNTHETIC JUDEGMENT AND
ANALYTIC JUDGEMENT

Kant’s legacy has come from his distinction on the analytic-synthetic. which is at the
heat of the transcendental Idealism of Kant. Though it is hard for some philosophers to
accept this distinction. And many criticised his ideas.

In the introduction to Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explicates the criterion of

conceptual containment, which states that a judgment is analytic if the predicate belongs to
the subject and it is synthetic if the predicate lies outside the subject, although it does indeed
stand in connection with it. An analytic judgment adds nothing through the predicate to the
concept of the subject, but merely breaking it up into those constituent concepts that have all
along been thought in it, that is by analogy which is identical. The predicate of a synthetic
judgment, on the other hand, could not be extracted from the subject by any form of analysis2.

Furthermore, in clarifying what he means by conceptual containment, Kant introduces

the criterion of identity, writing that analytic judgments are those in which the connection of
the predicate with the subject is thought through identity. Whereas synthetic judgments are
defined negatively as those in which this connection is thought without identity3.

Moreover, Kant asserts that the principle of contradiction is a sufficient criterion of

truth for the analytic also indicates that we should be able to determine the analyticity of a
judgment by testing that judgment against the principle of contradiction. So, for example, we
can conclude that "all bachelors are unmarried" is both analytic and true, since its negation
asserts a contradiction. Synthetic judgments, however, require a quite different principle from
which they may be deduced, subject, of course, to the law of contradiction, namely inner
sense and it’s a priori form, time.

II HOW CAN WE THINK OF EXISTENCE AND GOD

2
https://media.neliti.com/media/publications/77091-EN-a-discussion-on-the-analytic-and-synthet.pdf
3
Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la Raison Pure, Quadrige, Presses Universitaire de France, Paris, 1944, 37.
 For Kant, according to special metaphysics where he says that our reason cannot be
that limited that even though we cannot not really come to know God who is the noumena we
can at least think of God who is and His existence is in His essence we cannot separate
existence from God to talk of God is to say he exist. For this Kant makes a distinction
between the phenomena from the noumen here he says God is not an object in which we can
know the phenomena God is a noumen we can have an idea of God´s existence. We talk of
God as noumena. God existence is pure for he exists for himself he does not need another
being for him to exist. To know or think about god we have by talking about existence and
God together. Ontological arguments claim that we can deduce the existence of God from the
concept of God. Just from thinking about what God is, we can conclude that God must exist.
Because it doesn’t depend on experience in any way, the ontological argument is a priori.

CONCLUSION
 At the end of this work we can say that Kant´s teaching and his critique on
metaphysics was good for it was able to open up paths that were closed by the traditional
metaphysics which stood for the fact that we can only know the phenomena through sensible
intuition, understanding, reason and then knowledge. For them human knowledge was so
limited we cannot know God. But though we cannot come to the full knowledge of who God
is through human reason we can think about God and thinking about something means that
that thing exist therefore God exist and we cannot separate God from existence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la Raison Pure, Quadrige,

Presses Universitaire de France, Paris, 1944.

https://media.neliti.com/media/publications/77091-
EN-a-discussion-on-the-analytic-and-synthet.pdf