Entre o racionalizável e o irracionalizável: uma resposta Kantiana ao problema da determinação do status nomológico do princípio de razão suficiente

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate what are the conditions and limits, within the critical system of Kant’s philosophy, under which a transcendental deduction of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) would be possible and, thus, determine its nomological status. Given this purpose, the chapters will be divided as follows: i) in the first, I will deal with what we must consider as being the strongest version of the PSR and how, in Kant’s critical philosophy, it appears under the name of “supreme principle of pure reason”. To achieve this goal, I’ll show the reasons why we could consider that the strongest version of the PSR is the one provided by Leibniz, and not those of Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza, since the leibnizian formula aims to structure the principle in a way that it, as basis of the system, provide unity to the system of the all of reality. Then I’ll present how a speculative principle with a similar structure of Leibniz’s PSR appears, in the Critique of pure reason, with the name of “supreme principle of pure reason”, and not as “principle of sufficient reason”, expression under which Kant, very often, use to refers to the “principle of causality”, whose structure and scope, although similar to the PSR, is not identical to it; ii) in the second chapter, in turn, once it has been determined how the PSR appears in Kant’s critical philosophy, I’ll examine under which conditions we could determine the nomological status of this principle, i.e., whether we should consider it as a subjective, regulative maxim of our reason in its investigations, or as an objective, constitutive law of reality itself. For this, I’ll introduce how the “reason” and the “ideas”, apart from the limitations of sensibility, lead the categories of understanding to the idea of the unconditioned. Next, I’ll present the two forms under which the PSR shows itself in the critical system: as a subjective maxim of reason’s proceedings, in a way that it concerns rather something about reason, and not about the world, and as an objective law, where the relationship is reversed insofar as in this version the principle refers to something in the world and not to the procedure that reason adopts. Finally, I’ll present under which conditions we could effectuate a transcendental deduction of the PSR, showing for what reasons the transcendental deduction of the objective, i.e., constitutive validity of the PSR, by depending of an object that cannot, under any circumstances, be an object of a possible experience, would be, therefore, impossible. Thus, iii) in the third and last chapter of this dissertation, I’ll show the reasons that, according to the kantian transcendental method, make impossible the transcendental deduction of the PSR’s objective version – i.e., the one that is in question in the leibnizian metaphysics. I’ll begin, so, arguing how the kantian criticism, based on exclusively pre-critical arguments, addresses and shows itself efficient against all the main formulations of the pre-critical ontological arguments, that is, those undertaken by Anselmo, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Then, in order to conclude this investigation, I’ll argue how, from the “copernican twist”, the kantian critique of the ontological argument extends even to the version that Kant himself formulated earlier in the pre-critical period, so that, without criteria to determine how an object conforming to the concept of the unconditioned could be considered existent outside the idea that we have of it, we cannot elevate the PSR from the status of a subjective, regulative maxim of reason, to that of an objective, constitutive law of things, retaining only the former, and only insofar as it serves as basis for propel reason, in its speculative interest, to search for the completeness of the systematic unity of the knowledge of understanding