Basing on Kant’s vast oeuvre, which includes not only published works, but also corre-spondence, lectures and handwritten heritage, the paper explains the meaning of the concept “ontology” in relation to the evolution of the philosopher’s thoughts. An analysis of Kant’s relevant word-usage shows that in the period of criticism he is inclined to adapt traditional metaphysica generalis in the frame of a new project of transcendental philosophy. However, at the same time, certain ways and contexts of usage of the ontological vocabulary remain inher-ited from the German metaphysical school, which is especially evident in the concept of «on-tological proof».

Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of act is considered as an anti-metaphysical project, which arises in the course of self-refuting development of his original metaphysics. Bakhtin’s version of self-refuting transformation of initial metaphysics into further anti-metaphysics is explored in a wider context of similar projects in European philosophy of late 18 – late 19 centuries (Reid, Engels, Marx, Nietzsche). Bakhtin appears to be close to Marx in his gradual shift from “direct” metaphysics to “transformed forms” of philosophizing that grasp the original subject of their initial “first philosophy” at a more concrete level via tools of some “particular” science (political economy for Marx, “aesthetics of verbal creation” for Bakhtin). At the same time, Bakhtin’s “aesthetics of verbal creation” proves to be actually a kind of “meta-philology” somewhat close to the “philosophical philology” of early Nietzsche.

The article analyses M. M. Bakhtin’s early works “Art and Responsibility” and “Toward a Philosophy of Act” which show that the philosophical way of Russian thinker was essentially parallel to the path of Western philosophy from Heidegger to post-structuralism and at the same time was an original attempt to overcome the transcendental approach in philosophy and aesthetics. Bakhtin worked out his original “first” philosophy of being or moral philosophy as polemically opposed to the Western philosophy of mind and especially to Kant’s philosophy. But it was not free from certain transcendental moments connected with the orientation on the phenomenological method which later caused Bakhtin’s evolvution towards hermeneutical philosophy of language and culture.

Leibniz disputes the ontological argument of Anselm and Descartes, because he does not find in it a demonstration of the possibility of the concept of God, namely justification of the consistency of this concept. As the latter requires an agreement of a single human will and the will of the Creator, the problem of this proof cannot be solved by a priori arguments, but also requires a posteriori argument, based on the reliability of the internal experience of consciousness. This paper, basing on Monadology and New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, analyzes Leibniz’s understanding of the role of memory in constituting the experience of continuity of consciousness and the connection of the concept of memory with the arguments from Theodicy.