Essay on Transcendental Philosophy

by Salomon Maimon, Alistair Welchman (Translator), Nick Midgley (Translator)

Essay on Transcendental Philosophy presents the first English translation of Salomon Maimon's principal work, originally published in Berlin in 1790. In this book, Maimon seeks to further the revolution in philosophy wrought by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by establishing a new foundation for transcendental philosophy in the idea of difference. Kant judged Maimon to be his most profound critic, and the Essay went on to have a decisive influence on the course of post-Kantian German Idealism. A more recent admirer was Gilles Deleuze who drew on Maimon's Essay in constructing his own philosophy of difference. This long-overdue translation makes Maimon's brilliant analysis and criticism of Kant's philosophy accessible to an English readership for the first time. The text includes a comprehensive introduction, a glossary, translators' notes, a bibliography of writings on Maimon and an index. It also includes translations of correspondence between Maimon and Kant and a letter Maimon wrote to a Berlin journal clarifying the philosophical position of the essay, all of which bring the book's context alive for the modern reader.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Metaphysics, Germany

350 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1989

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maimon is truly the one acme in the body of Kantianism that refuses to wither away on its own. Maimon professes to a faithful student of Kant and characterizes his own philosophical activity as a kind of a transcendental 'housekeeping', swimming in the wake of the great Prussian-German thinker. But all readers of Maimon should know by now that this modest characterization belies a heretic ambition that threatens to undo Kant's achievements from the inside. According to Kant's letter to Herz, Maimon should be charged with heresy on at least three counts
(1) denial of the objective reality of the categories and the legitimacy of their application as apriori forms to aposteriori matter (and therefore the denial of one of the hard-won achievements of the First Critique--transcendental deduction), instead introducing an "infinite reason" as an ideal or a limit that our subjective necessity fueled by the empirical law of asssociation is destined to approximate ever closer without ever realizing it, which itself is introduced to solve the problem caused by the
(2) reworking of the standard Kantian notion of Understanding as a faculty that does not merely think, judge and synthesize the matter of cognition supplied by Sensibility/Intuition into concepts (form of cognition) but one that also actively produces its own objects or matter of cognition (e.g. mathematical objects) as synthetic apriori knowledge proper, effectively barring almost all objects of natural science and everyday experience from entry into the kingdom of synthetic apriori knowledge and the
(3) reworking of things-in-themselves as limits or ideas of Reason that Reason itself has generated to solve what Maimon calls the "university antinomy of thought in general", which is a consequence of the tension between thought's imperious demand that it be self-sufficient and generate its own matter of cognition as well as its form (denial of the given understood as matter supplied from the outside) and the recognition of the legimate requirement that matter is a necessary condition for self-conscious cognizance
One would imagine that the among the three the first heresy likely turned out to be the most unforgivable offence for Kant, since it complicates his claim to have successfully responded to Hume's challenge that causality can have only subjective but not objective necessity. In a sense, Maimon's most adventurous insight may very well be his intuition that the Kantian interdiction (pg. 233) on an 'genetic' explanation of how it is that "[...] such functions of the understanding" can be harmonized with something aposteriori in a "[...] possible [experiential] cognition" cannot be comfortably maintained, especially not if one admits, as Kant himself does, of the possibility of there being other thinking beings with a radically different kind of understanding.

So is Maimon inside the Kantian tent pissing out, or the other way around? For the most concise statement on where Maimon himself (rational dogmatist and empirical skeptic) claims to stand vis-a-vis Hume and the empiricists, Kant (empirical dogmatist and rationalist skeptic), Leibniz, and Wolff, consult the 'concluding note'. Otherwise, Maimon's essay is a sharp if not sometimes a bit scatter-brained attempt at Post-Kantianism and it would be remiss of any student of transcendental philosophy to not be acquainted with this treatise. Long live heretic Kantianism!

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is what happens when you do drugs while reading Kants analogies and anticipations of perception sections of the first critique.

[Bogdan Stefan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5 because of how complicated it is to read for me. Maimon is definitely a unique and innovative thinker. Maybe ever more so than Kant.

Maybe someday day I'll be able to read this without going back over each paragraph ten times

[Chance Palm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will return.