Thank you for sharing this short article. I was thinking about writing a paper on whether and to what extent Bl. Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors and/or St. Pius X’s Pascendi Domini Gregis applied to Kant, specifically the Kant of the First and Second Critiques. I googled and your article came up.

It struck me that Pascendi Domini Gregis does not name names, at least not Kant’s. While Kant’s philosophical agnosticism regarding God’s existence is undeniable, attributing to him a general philosophical agnosticism is questionable because there is a difference between Kant’s own account of that distinction and how it is often taught.

It seems to me usually overlooked that the de facto target of Kant’s critique is neither St. Thomas Aquinas nor Thomists, but rather the scholasticism of Wolff and Leibniz. Of course, this is only made clear in an appendix (of all places!) in the Critique of Pure Reason–”On the amphiboly …” (See especially A283-4/B339-40.) If Leibniz’s monad is the prime example of a thing in itself, then Kant is saying we cannot know things such as monads. And if Kant is willing to admit that I can know this tree as a living growing thing, but not as a monad, then is this really philosophical agnosticism?

It seems to me that Kant is arguing, however circuitously, for an Aristotilean principle, viz. that nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses.

Now Pascendi Domini Gregis seems to assert the connection between the phaenomena/noumena distinction and agnosticism regarding God’s existence. Again, however, it is questionable whether this applies to Kant. Kant’s critique of the arguments for God’s existence do not directly concern this distinction, but rather concern his contention that all other arguments are dependent on the ontological argument, to which his objection is ontological, viz. that “[b]eing is obviously not a real predicate.” (A598/B626)

Agnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge (gnosis), and the privative “a” (meaning “not”). In its general sense, agnosticism is any system which lacks epistemological certitude about things. I note that Webster’s first definition is “a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable,” but that it gives another definition: “a person unwilling to commit to an opinion about something .”

The definition can be found here:

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?sourceid=Mozilla-search&va=agnostic

By the way, those heretics who denied Christ’s omniscience were called the “Agnoetae,” a word which has a common origin with agnostic. They claimed Our Lord had “ignorance” of things; in other words, He did not know certain things.

(See http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01215b.htm for an explanation of the Agnoetae.)

The meaning of agnosticism I’m going for is more “philosophical” than “religious” in that it describes a system which has a problem with knowledge itself. The word is sometimes used this way, though not very often.

So, Kant is certainly agnostic in that he denies the ability of the human mind to know. One may wonder why anybody with such a silly system would bother to write books (since people can’t “know” what’s in them!), but that is to get a glimpse of the idiocy of Kant’s philosophy.

I reply to your other question: To lobotomize is to sever part of the brain from the rest of it. I was trying to get across the idea of putting an “incision” in the mind (a spiritual faculty), bifurcating or separating the faculties of the soul from each other. In other words, the modernists made a false divide between belief and knowledge.

I hope my explanations help.

“Lobotomizes the soul” is another nice turn of phrase, but what do you mean “lobotomizes the soul BETWEEN knowing and . . . believing.” I don’t get the word “between” there.