L'impensé de l'existence. Kant et la scolastique

The paper aims to follow the hidden traces of Francisco Suárez’ metaphysics (esp. his notions of “ens”, essentia realis” and “existence”) in Immanuel Kant’s theory of “being” not intended as a “real predicate”, but rather as the “simple position of a thing”. The Author will underline the influence of the ontological-transcendental heritage arising from a very “dogmatic” work (so it would be defined by Kant) as the Metaphysical Disputations (1597) of Suárez – and thanks to the mediation of Christian Wolff’s Philosophia prima sive Ontologia (1729) and Alexander G. Baumgarten’s Metaphysica (1739) – on the critical-transcendental theses of some anti-dogmatic works of Kant, like The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), the Critique of pure Reason (1781) and the Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion (1783/84). In both Suárez and Kant, starting from different contexts and working in different perspectives, the datum of existence tends to be identified with what exists; more precisely, with the fact that something is produced by a cause (Suárez) or in the fact that something is part of our category of causality (Kant). This common decision concerning the sense of “existing” is certainly made to safeguard the fact of existing as different from what we think a priori by way of concepts alone. Yet in both cases the price to pay is too high. Because the fact of existing becomes even more the existence of a thing which only tell us about itself as a coming-out or an exit from causes, in which the surplus of being or the mistery of provenance is almost totally reduced to the constitution of a mere product, namely the production of God or of the function of our understanding.