MAIMON, SALOMON. - Philosopher, b. at Neschwitz (Lithuania) in 1754, d. at Nieder-Siegersdorf (Liegnitz, southern Silesia) on 22 Nov. 1800. His original name was S. ben Yéhoshuná (he assumed that of M. in homage to Maimonides [v.], whom he held in the highest veneration). The son of a rabbi, he devoted himself from childhood, spent in economic hardship, to the study of the Talmud. He lived in Berlin, Hamburg, Königsberg, Amsterdam, Hanover, Breslau, and spent his last years with Count Kalckreuth, in Silesia.
The Lebensgeschichte (Berlin 1793; Italian trans. Milan 1920), the most effective document of his wandering and agitated life, contains, among other things, a sad picture of the social conditions of Poland at that time. Among his other works mention should be made of: 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 in the full current of Kantianism. The Transzendentalphilosophie results from the various tendencies on which his philosophical culture was formed; in particular the Kantian, Humean and Spinozistic-Leibnizian ones. 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, on the other to the necessity of a power unifying the manifold. M.'s solution consists in having eliminated the presupposition of the thing in itself as the cause of representations and in having reduced 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 given is what consciousness cannot produce at will, but what is produced in it without its penetrating the cause and the mode of production, that is, an imperfect consciousness. This imperfection of consciousness can be noticed through a decrease that goes from clearly determined consciousness down to the nothing of consciousness. Consequently, the given is the simple idea of the limit of this series, to which one can draw near as to an irrational magnitude without being able to comprehend it » (Philos. Wort., p. 169). This limit that escapes every intuition is the « differential of consciousness ». With regard to the a priori forms, having excluded, with Kant, the naturalistic thesis of space and time as properties of things in themselves, M. denies the possibility of considering them 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 a Koalitionsystem.
M.'s philosophy, considered as a chapter of Kantianism, although it moves on a plane different from the Critique, as Kant himself recognized (to M. Herz, 26 May 1789, in Briefwechsel, ed. Meiner, I, Leipzig 1924, pp. 395-402), nevertheless has in common the demand for a reform of the principles for a future metaphysics. The insufficient analysis of the given, to which the property of the immediately known is not recognized, and the retained character of the constructivity of consciousness, nevertheless constrain this philosophy within the narrows of phenomenism.