Kant I b

I feel the need to emphasize that there are no ontological claims being made as of yet (in the Kant post below). Well no, "no" claims is the wrong wording. It is just not the standard claim.

I mentioned blue and the Universal blue-ness, that i am only claiming a mechanism for seeing blue must exist, and am not making any ontological claims about what "blue" is.

Similarly ... the basic proofs of a gorunding, of a godhead, may sound similar but are making stronger ontological claims. The argument that if there is change, cause/effect, there must be a Prime Mover to start the chain, or if there is any being (mass noun) at all, there must be a Prime Being as a ground for it ... and etc through the proofs of God.
In each of these cases there is a thing out there, an existence, that makes the phenomenon in question possible.
I am staying on the "other side", on the inside, in my claim. To encounter being, there needs be a mechanism by which we encounter being. To see change in the world, there must be a mechanism by which we experience the cheange.
I'd say the move i'm making is closer to the Cartesian "cogito as immanent being" argument ... but again ... whithout the claim of a robust thing, only a mechanism. Closer to "I think, (therefore) there is thinking" than "I think, (therefore) I am".
[Descartes specifically did not want the cogito argument to be a deduction, but rather an immanent knowledge. He used "therefore" to clarify the grammar, but really he meant no usage of it as a logical operator.]

So that is the state of play ... the only ontological claim being the thinnest, a functionalist, a mechanism, and nothing more at this point.

I will discuss Newton, Leibniz and Kant and they will mean more, but i do not.