Abstract

The result of Kant’s reflection on the traditional concept of truth as adequacy between knowledge or concept and object – the view that there is no general material or general formal criterion of truth which would be sufficient – leads towards the critical insight that we are regarding holding to be true, and that it presents itself in three modes: either as opinion, belief or knowledge. Therefore, not only Hegel, but Kant too came to realise that a proposition is not “adequate” to “express” truth, but that a proposition – understood as an objectively valid relation which we formed – is what we hold to be true. What is striking and unsurpassably current in this finding is primarily the unique position and weight of knowledge which, according to Kant, also presents a mode of holding to be true, and not that kind – unattainable to a human – in which we the truth could be ensured without question. Thus, Kant's Critical philosophy is by no means no only met in the insight that existence cannot be expressed by a concept, but also in a no less fundamental insight that equally little can be inferred from the existence of concept.