tself entail the proposition. For example, "My brother is Joseph" is a synthetic proposition because nothing in thinking about the nature of brothers or what the word "my" means will suggest any relation to the particular person Joseph. "A brother is a male sibling," however, is an analytic proposition. That is, a male sibling is contained within the concept of the term brother. Kant’s point here is that no concept in and of itself contains the attribute of existence necessarily. That is, when Anselm conceives of God as a necessarily existing being, that he has created a fiction.To give Kant’s point more life, let me use the example of a chair. When one thinks about chairs, nothing about the existence of particular chairs is implied. That is, chairs may or may not exist. They are said to have contingent existence. Kant claims that this is true of everything about which one thinks. Thus, there is a gap between the thoughts that we have and whether knowing whether those thoughts that we have actually exist.So, Anselm tried to prove that God actually exists, and he defined God as a being that actually exists. However, Kant denies that any thought contains within it the concept of existence, even the concept of an actually existing being.Bertrand Russell makes a similar point in his critique of the ontological argument for the existence of God. What makes a necessary existential proposition absurd to Bertrand Russell is the simple denial that there are any such things. Bertrand Russell finds that there is nothing that he can conceive of that he also can conceive of as not being. It is not that the conclusion of the ontological argument is true or false, but that it does not even represent a proposition. For Russell, "God necessarily exists" is what he calls a propositional function. A propositional function is:any expression containing an undetermined constituent, or several undetermined, and becoming a proposition as soon as th...
