Although there are some disputes about the year of Maimon’s birth, the accepted view is that he was born in 1753 near Sukoviborg (near Mir), Lithuania, in what is today Belarus. Solomon Maimon was not his given name at birth; rather, he was known as Shlomo ben Joshua. At around eleven years of age, he married and by the time he was fourteen, he was already a father. Beginning early in his life, he received training in Talmudic studies and became familiar with the Kabbalah as well as Hasidic texts and he came to revere Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, a text that had great influence on him. In fact, when he changed his name in order to follow western European conventions, he adopted the surname of “Maimon” of out reverence for the great medieval Jewish philosopher. Feeling the need in his mid-twenties to study more science and philosophy, Maimon left his family behind and went West. He stopped briefly in Berlin but was not allowed to enter the city. For almost two years after his explusion from Berlin, Maimon lived as a beggar before settling in Posen and receiving a job as a tutor. He later left for Berlin again and was allowed into the city this time. He became friends with Moses Mendelssohn and other Jewish intellectuals, who, despite Maimon’s bad German and his lack of social graces, tolerated him because they recognized that he possessed a very sharp intellect. Maimon traveled again, staying for a short time in Amsterdam. Finding the Jewish community there to be too bourgeois for him in its tastes and interests, he returned to Germany. Maimon settled in Hamburg where he entered a high school (most likely between 1783-85) and pursued studies to improve his knowledge of math, science, and the German language. Matriculation records from a German high school (a “Gymnasium”) list a Solomon Maimon among its pupils, so it is likely that Maimon began referring to himself with this name and not “Shlomo ben Joshua” during this stay in Germany

It was after this period that Maimon began his philosophical writings. He moved from Hamburg to Breslau (Wroclaw) and took up a position as a tutor with a family. He wrote several textbooks in Hebrew, one on math and one concerned with Newton’s physics. He also translated Moses Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden into Hebrew. At the end of the decade, Maimon traveled to Berlin yet again. It was at this point that he began his study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s friend, Marcus Herz, who was also a friend of Maimon’s, sent Kant Maimon’s draft of a commentary on the first Critique. Kant had no intention of reading through the commentary because he found himself too busy with other work. Yet, he later commented to Herz that a brief look through Maimon’s manuscript showed him that Maimon had understood the first Critique better than all of Kant’s other critics. With Kant’s “accolade” in hand, Maimon attained a legitimacy that opened several doors and publishing avenues for him. Maimon revised the manuscript and published it in 1790 as Versuch über die Transcendentalphilosophie, mit einem Anhang über die symbolische Erkenntnis und Anmerkungen [Essay on Transcendental Philosophy with an Appendix on Symbolic Knowledge, and Notes]. (Hereafter, this text will be cited as the “Versuch”)]. On the whole, the work is a set of criticisms of Kant’s first Critique but it also interspersed with criticisms of or elaborations on Maimon’s own commentary on Kant.. Between 1791 and 1800, Maimon went on to write nine other books and numerous articles published in some of the more prominent German-language journals of the day. Maimon lived in poverty for most of the early part of the 1790’s. For the last five years of his life, he was supported by Adolf von Kalkreuth, a noble with considerable interest in philosophy. Maimon lived on von Kalkreuth's estate near Glogow, in what is today southwestern Poland. Maimon died on 22 November 1800. Supposedly, the Jewish citizens of Glogow disapproved of Maimon for not being a pious Jew and he was not allowed to be buried within the Jewish cemetery.

Maimon claims that there were several phases to his philosophical development. The first – and perhaps most important stage – was Maimon’s early encounter with Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. It is because of Maimonides that Maimon falls under the spell of rationalistic schools of thought. Not only does Maimon obtain from Maimonides the idea that philosophy – and furthermore, human existence – should be about the attainment of truth, but he also takes from Maimonides the belief that religion and its doctrines must be consistent with philosophy. As will become evident from what is written below, many of the doctrines to which Maimon professes can be traced back to Maimonides. Secondly, in his early visits to Berlin, Maimon comes into contact with other, more recent thinkers also in the rationalistic tradition: the Leibnizian-inspired philosopher Christian Wolff, Leibniz, and Spinoza. At that time in Germany, Spinoza was seen as a very dangerous figure because the accepted view of his philosophy was that it necessarily led to atheism. Maimon disagreed and had a significant respect for Spinoza. Finally, Maimon came upon Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in early 1787 and was awed by it. It was probably at this time that Maimon came into contact with English empiricism, and Hume in particular. As will be discussed below, a very important strand of Maimon’s thought is occupied with Humean skepticism. However, scholars differ as to whether or not skepticism ends up being Maimon’s settled view.

It is difficult to summarize Maimon’s views given that none of his works is systematic and that his views evolved somewhat over the 10 year period in which he was publishing his writings. In fact, it is this lack of systematicity – as well as Maimon’s German, which at times is extremely unclear – that has contributed to Maimon’s lack of recognition. Often his texts read like conglomerations of stream-of-consciousness thoughts, albeit very perceptive ones. He does, however, give a clue about his philosophy as a whole when he describes his thought as a “coalition system” [Koalitionssystem] in which he attempts to incorporate the main ideas of previous schools of thought or important thinkers. The extent to which these ideas actually can be made to fit into a coherent system is open for debate. Likewise, there is question among the scholars as to which school of thought Maimon ultimately sides. The question is not easily resolved.

Maimon’s work was only rediscovered in the mid-1800’s and it just beginning to receive the attention that it deserves. Until recently, he has achieved more notoriety because of his Autobiography, originally published in 1792-93, the first part of which is currently available in English. The book is noteworthy because, in addition to documenting Maimon’s travels and tribulations, it provides one of the very earliest depictions of life in an Eastern European Jewish community, a “stetl.” Despite the historical and “sociological” significance of this Autobiography, he should be seen first and foremost as a philosopher. Kant recognized Maimon’s talents and saw that Maimon was one of the few who seemed to understand the project of the first Critique. Due to the similarity of themes on which Maimon wrote in his Versuch über die Transcendentalphilosophie and themes that Kant addresses in the Critique of Judgment (1790), it is possible that Maimon’s thought had some influence on doctrines that Kant brings forth in this Critique. Fichte mentions Maimon by name in many places in his early work and there is no doubt that some of his doctrines are responses to Maimon’s view. In fact, Maimon is one of the first philosophers of that era to take the history of philosophy seriously and to attempt to show how his views are, in a certain respect, the culmination of developments within the evolution of philosophical thought. In order to understand the development of German Idealism, one must understand where Maimon fits into the movement. Maimon, however, merits attention for being more than just an important, yet underappreciated figure in the development of German Idealism. In particular, his worries about the gap between the quid juris and the quid facti need to be applied to all of the philosophies in the movement. It is not clear if any of the major figures of German Idealism – Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel – ultimately can or do give adequate responses to the problem of the quid juris. More importantly, these worries can be extended to any type of systematic philosophy or rationalistic system of thought. Maimon calls our attention to the fact that it is not enough if a system, a philosophical or scientific system for example, is internally coherent. Internal coherence only gives an answer to the question of the quid juris. What still needs to be shown is not simply how it is possible for such a system to map onto our empirical world, but that the given system does, in fact, map onto the world. Another way of looking at the issue is that Maimon is concerned with the status of science, in the broadest connotation of “science.” It is not enough for science to provide us with a good story or a coherent story about how the world is. Instead, science must give the correct story about how the world is and one that can completely justify its claims. The problem is – and here we return to the gap between the quid juris and the quid facti – science is still only giving us a good or seemingly accurate story.




http://www.iep.utm.edu/m/maimon.htm