Salomon Maimon (1753–1800): key ideas and works

Maimon was born in a Lithuanian village near Mir and had a traditional Talmudic education; at eleven he was married in an arranged ceremony. Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed opened philosophy to him, and he later took the name Maimon in Maimonides’ honour. He briefly visited the court of the Maggid of Mezrich, one of the founders of Hasidism, and his autobiography is among the most valuable sources on the early movement. In his twenties he left his family for Berlin, where he joined the circle of Moses Mendelssohn, though his open Spinozism and bohemian life led Mendelssohn to ask him to leave.

In 1787 he studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and sent him his objections. Kant replied that none of his critics had understood him as well as Maimon, and Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy followed in 1790. He lived in poverty in Berlin until a Silesian nobleman gave him a home on his estate, where he died in 1800. His criticisms of Kant’s division of the mind into understanding and sensibility deeply influenced Fichte and the rise of German Idealism. He was also, it seems, the first to describe Spinoza’s philosophy as acosmism, which denies the reality of the world, not of God, a reading later adopted by Hegel.

Key ideas

The thing in itself as a limit

Kant’s thing in itself cannot be a real entity lying behind experience. It is the full determination of an object by concepts, which our knowledge can only approach without end, “nothing other than the complete cognition of appearances”.

No separate source of the given

What seems simply given in experience is produced by the mind’s own activity, though a finite mind is unaware of how. An infinite intellect would produce all its content consciously; we do so only in mathematics. Space and time mark where our concepts of things are still incomplete.

The law of determinability

A genuine connection between concepts, as opposed to an arbitrary one made by the imagination, must satisfy the law of determinability, which Maimon made the principle of all real thought. Mathematics meets it; empirical knowledge never can.

Humean dogmatism

Maimon called himself a “Humean dogmatist”. Reason tells us what genuine knowledge would require, but, as Hume showed, we can never prove that it applies to experience, which we must explain by habit and regularity. We see the promised land from afar but cannot enter it.

The good is the true

Practical reason has no primacy over theoretical. “The moral good is good only because it is true”, and nothing can be called good without limitation except the striving after knowledge.

Influences

Where these links come from

Salomon Maimon drew on Maimonides. Source: Peter Thielke and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Salomon Maimon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Salomon Maimon drew on Baruch Spinoza. Source: Peter Thielke and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Salomon Maimon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Salomon Maimon drew on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Source: Peter Thielke and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Salomon Maimon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Salomon Maimon drew on David Hume. Source: Peter Thielke and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Salomon Maimon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Salomon Maimon drew on and argued against Immanuel Kant. Source: Peter Thielke and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Salomon Maimon, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Gilles Deleuze drew on Salomon Maimon. Source: Daniel Smith, John Protevi and Daniela Voss, Gilles Deleuze, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Salomon Maimon

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