The Morality, God and the Religion in Critical Philosophy of Kant

The philosophy and the religion are the two different domains that are mainly addressed to find the most fundamental answers that we seek to lead our lives by attaching it a meaning that can satisfy us. For this reason, with regard to this important task that we attach to both of them, they seem to be aiming for the same direction in order to arrive at a common end regarding our life, which can be announced briefly as the truth. Because of this collective end, we see that these two domains get close to each other, support each other, or use one another according to the explanations that they adopt. Nevertheless in the matter of the claim of truth it is also probable that an inevitable conflict emerges between the two. The history of philosophy and the history of religions testify too many examples of this cooperation as well as those conflicts, to which critical philosophy is part as a well-known and often discussed example. Our thesis aims examining the position of Kant's critical philosophy, which bears a very strong claim of the truth and therefore, in its relation with the religion, it maintains a rather conflictual position. It is evident that the scope of religion finds its most adequate equivalent in Kant's moral thought, however, we note that all of the critical philosophy, if we use the terminology of Kant, having an architectural structure, retains this subject throughout its parts. This is the reason why we organized our work according to the most important parts of this structure on which it stands, in order to obtain the most appropriate illustration that we can attain. The architectonical structure of the critical philosophy directs us almost in a constrained way to examine our subject by a tripartite classification in the present work. Because, according to this structure, Kant elaborates his conception of religion at each moment of his thought by taking in hand the various aspects of the subject (pure speculative, pure practical, empirical and historical etc.). These are the most important features of the critical philosophy with which we can arrive finding a satisfying exposition of our subject. For this reason we have divided our work in three chapters in which firstly we examine the critique of natural theology which includes Kant's objection that points to onto-theology, which marks the whole of the Western thought. Then we examine the moral philosophy of Kant, which is the unique domain to encompass and value the religion in terms of a final moral end of nature and all reasonable beings that are apt to achieve this end. And finally