Salomon Maimon’s Philosophy and its Place in the Enlightenment

Abstract

The notion of difference (Verschiedenheit) plays an essential part in Salomon Maimon’s philosophy, and is related to other major themes he develops: the relation between time and space as the forms of intuition and logic, the link between logic and transcendental philosophy, the role of the differential, etc. One could even say that his elaboration of this notion is one of his prime contributions to philosophy. The problems that arise thereby serve to explicate the difficulty, even impossibility, of a simple return to Leibniz after Kant. The purpose of this paper is to show how the problems attending the notion of difference limit the possible interpretations of infinite intellect in Maimon’s philosophy. In the first part, I will examine Maimon’s reflections on the notion of difference. I will begin by looking at Kant’s notion of real opposition, since I think it constitutes a necessary background for understanding the main issues connected with Maimon’s working out of his notion of difference. In the second part, I will propose several interpretations of logic and infinite intellect in Maimon, given the constraints that the notion of difference imposes on a possible elaboration of logic. Finally, I will reduce these interpretations to two: the first belongs to the set of options suggested by Kant’s philosophy; the second represents, in my opinion, Maimon’s unique contribution to the ongoing process of understanding the notion of difference.KeywordsQualitative DistinctionTranscendental IdealFormal ThoughtTranscendental PhilosophyMutual DeterminationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.