MAIMON, SALOMON. — Philosopher, born at Neschwitz (Lithuania) in 1754, died at Nieder-Siegersdorf (Liegnitz, southern Silesia) on 22 November 1800. His original name was S. ben Yéhoshuná (he adopted that of M. in homage to Maimonides [v.] whom he held in the highest veneration). The son of a rabbi, from childhood, spent amid economic hardship, he devoted himself to the study of the Talmud. He lived in Berlin, Hamburg, Königsberg, Amsterdam, Hannover, Breslau, and spent his final years with Count Kalckreuth in Silesia.
The Lebensgeschichte (Berlin 1793; Italian trans. Milan 1920), the most effective record of his wandering and agitated life, contains, among other things, a sombre picture of the social conditions of Poland at that time. Among his other works, the following should be recalled: Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie (Berlin 1790); Philosophisches Wörterbuch, etc. (ibid. 1791); Bacons von Verulam neues Organon (ibid. 1793); Versuch einer neuen Logik oder Theorie des Denkens (ibid. 1794); Die Kategorien des Aristoteles (ibid. 1794); Kritische Untersuchungen über den menschlichen Geist, etc. (Leipzig 1797).
M.’s philosophy develops wholly within Kantianism. The Transzendentalphilosophie results from the various tendencies that shaped his philosophical culture, particularly the Kantian, Humean, and Spinozistic-Leibnizian tendencies. The Kantian dualism of sensibility and understanding led, on the one hand, to the admission of a thing-in-itself as the cause of representations and, on the other, to the necessity of a power unifying the manifold. M.’s solution consists in eliminating the presupposition of the thing-in-itself as the cause of representations and in reducing knowledge to the synthesis of the data produced by the imagination. The origin of these data remains unknown because it takes place in a remote sphere of consciousness. “The datum is that which consciousness cannot produce at will, but which is produced in it without its cause and mode of production penetrating into it, that is, an imperfect consciousness. This imperfection of consciousness can be observed through a decrease that extends from clearly determined consciousness to the nothingness of consciousness. Consequently, the datum is simply the idea of the limit of this series, which one can approach as an irrational magnitude without being able to comprehend it” (Philos. Wort., p. 169). This limit, which eludes every intuition, is the “differential of consciousness.” As regards the a priori forms, having rejected, with Kant, the naturalistic thesis that space and time are properties of things-in-themselves, M. denies that they can be regarded as transcendental forms of the object. In the Logik (1794), M. substantially modifies his epistemology, finally leaving the impression of an eclecticism that he himself did not hesitate to call Koalitionsystem.
M.’s philosophy, considered as a chapter in Kantianism, although it moves on a plane different from that of the Critique, as Kant himself acknowledged (to M. Herz, 26 May 1789, in Briefwechsel, ed. Meiner, I, Leipzig 1924, pp. 395–402), nevertheless shares with it the demand for a reform of principles for a future metaphysics. The insufficient analysis of the datum, to which the property of being immediately known is not accorded, and the retention of the constructive character of consciousness nevertheless confine this philosophy within the narrow limits of phenomenalism.