Kant on Rational Reference: Theology as transcendental philosophy

The Critical Kant famously held that our cognition requires intuition, or essentially singular representation. Kant is also often understood as taking a dismissive attitude toward his rationalist predecessors' accounts of how we cognize singulars or individuals. In this paper, I provide a new reconstruction of Kant's account of rationalist complete concepts, which are central to the rationalist account of referring to and thus cognizing singulars. I argue that Kant took his predecessors to closely approach a viable account of cognizing singulars. The rationalist's idea of God has an important role within this account: the idea of God grounds the possibility of the rationalist's cognition of singulars. This, I argue, shows that Kant takes rational theology to perform a central function of transcendental philosophy, within the systems of his predecessors. Finally, I explain how this reading of rational singularity suggests a new understanding of Kant's account of reason. Reason is sophisticated, or naturally sensitive to the problem of how our representations can be about objects, rather than naïve, or naturally assuming that our representations simply do match up to objects.