Ontotheology

Ontotheology means the ontology of God and/or the theology of being. While the term was first used by Immanuel Kant, it has only come into broader philosophical parlance with the significance it took for Martin Heidegger's later thought. While, for Heidegger, the term is used to critique the whole tradition of 'Western metaphysics', much recent scholarship has sought to question whether 'ontotheology' developed at a certain point in the metaphysical tradition, with many seeking to equate the development of 'ontotheological' thinking with the development of modernity, and Duns Scotus often being cited as the first 'ontotheologian'.

The term "ontotheology" was coined by Immanuel Kant in direct conjunction with the term cosmotheology, "in order to distinguish between two competing types of 'transcendental theology'." The word's origin is often, mistakenly perhaps, associated with Heidegger who used the term quite frequently.

At the broadest level Kant had distinguished two general types of theology: that which comes from reason and that of revelation. Within the category of reasoned theology he distinguished two further types, "natural theology" and "transcendental theology". Within natural theology, Kant differentiated between "physico-theology" and an ethical or moral theology. Transcendental theology or reasoned-based theology, he divided into ontotheology and cosmotheology.

Ontotheology, according to Kant (as interpreted by Iain Thomson), "was the type of transcendental theology characteristic of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument which believes it can know the existence of an original being [Urwesen], through mere concepts, without the help of any experience whatsoever". Kant himself defined the relationship between ontotheology and cosmostheology as follows: "Transcendental theology aims either at inferring the existence of a Supreme Being from a general experience, without any closer reference to the world to which this experience belongs, and in this case it is called cosmotheology; or it endeavours to cognize the existence of such a being, through mere conceptions, without the aid of experience, and is then termed ontotheology."

Kant thus distinguishes between rationally-oriented (ontotheological) and empirically-oriented (cosmotheological) discussion. Consistently with Kant's definition, philosophical and theological writers sometimes use the words "ontotheology" or "ontotheological" to refer to the metaphysical or theological views characteristic of many rationalist philosophers. Heidegger, discussed below, later argued for a broader definition of the word ontotheology.

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