Kant and Baumgarten on positing. Kant's notion of positing as a response to that of Baumgarten

Resumen

In the literature on Kant’s philosophy, it is almost universally ignored that Baumgarten used the notion of positing in a technical sense before Kant. In this article, I try to fill this gap in the literature by providing an analysis of Kant’s notion of positing in relation to Baumgarten’s one. I first show how Kant's differentiation of relative and absolute positing is not simply an alternative to Baumgarten's notion of existence, but is instead an alternative to his (usually ignored) notion of positing; I then develop a positive account of Kant’s notion of positing.