Kant on the Dual Grounding of Possibility

Abstract The pre-Critical Kant holds that God is the ground of the possibility of all predicates. Yet it is not clear how God does this. A common approach is to distinguish between fundamental predicates, which God grounds directly by instantiating them, and derivative predicates, which God grounds indirectly. This essay argues that we should not distinguish between two sorts of predicates, some grounded directly and some grounded indirectly. We should distinguish between two sorts of grounding relations. As I will show, this dualism about grounding is both justified by the text and gives a satisfactory solution to the ‘how’ question.