Salomon Maimon Research Articles

Goethe, Maimon, and Spinoza's Third Kind of Cognition

Goethe, Maimon, and Spinoza's Third Kind of Cognition Jason Yonover The relationship between Goethe and Salomon Maimon has only been touched on once in the literature,1 and further clarification of the link between them remains a desideratum. Below I propose that the way to grasp their seeing eye to eye is through Spinoza, and specifically Spinoza's notion of scientia intuitiva. Initially I provide some context in order to illustrate what makes Maimon's role here rather unique. Then I sketch the relationship Maimon and Goethe had both to Spinoza and each other while emphasizing what is at stake. I conclude with various new findings. Preface It is widely known that Goethe was dissatisfied with the reception of his Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (Attempt to Clarify the Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790).2 For Goethe, such struggles came as an unfortunate surprise. Some of this we know because twenty-seven years after its initial publication Goethe publishes the Metamorphosis again within the collection Zur Morphologie (On Morphology I, 1817), and reflects there on the earlier edition of this work within a set of short pieces. He discusses the Metamorphosis in its status as a manuscript, a printed work, and a pivotal step in his study of plants—namely in the "Geschichte seiner botanischen Studien" ("History of the Author's Botanical Studies"). Regarding the manuscript, Goethe tells us retrospectively: Mit Herrn Göschen, dem Herausgeber meiner gesammelten Schriften, hatte ich alle Ursache zufrieden zu sein […] ich glaubte [aber] zu bemerken, mein Verleger finde den Absatz nicht ganz nach seinen Wünschen. Indessen hatte ich versprochen, meine künftigen Arbeiten ihm vor andern anzubieten, eine Bedingung, die ich immer für billig gehalten habe. Ich meldete ihm daher, daß eine kleine Schrift fertig liege, wissenschaftlichen Inhalts, deren Abdruck ich wünsche. Ob er sich nun überhaupt von meinen Arbeiten nicht mehr sonderlich viel versprochen, oder ob er in diesem Falle, wie ich vermuten kann, bei Sachverständigen Erkundigung eingezogen habe, was von einem solchen Übersprung in ein anderes Feld zu halten sein möchte, will ich nicht untersuchen, genug, ich konnte schwer begreifen, warum er mein Heft zu drucken ablehnte, da er, im schlimmsten Falle, durch ein so geringes Opfer von sechs [End Page 267] Bogen Makulatur einen fruchtbaren, frisch wieder auftretenden, zuverlässigen, genügsamen Autor sich erhalten hätte. (WA II, 6:133–34) [I had every reason to be satisfied with Herr Göschen, the publisher of my collected works […] but I gathered that he did not find their sale up to his expectations. Yet I had promised to offer future manuscripts to him before anyone else, an arrangement that I always considered to be fair. I therefore informed him that I had completed a brief manuscript of a scientific nature which I desired to have published. I shall not go into the question here as to whether he no longer felt that my works would ever again amount to much, or whether, as I suspect in this instance, he had sought advice from the experts, which might well be the case with such a venture into a new field. Suffice it to say, I found it hard to understand why he refused to print my booklet when, merely by sacrificing six sheets of maculation at the very most, he might have retained for himself a prolific, reliable, easily satisfied author who was just getting a fresh start.] (BW 168–69; translation altered) Goethe encountered difficulties with his natural-philosophical treatise on metamorphosis already prior to publication. The general reading public was, apparently, not in his favor. Though Goethe had been working with plants for years, researchers in the still-budding science of botany were skeptical: In what way could someone we understand to be a poet possibly add to the field? Female readers, marked as another audience, were also unimpressed: "Freundinnen, welche mich schon früher den einsamen Gebirgen, der Betrachtung starrer Felsen gern entzogen hätten, waren auch mit meiner abstrakten Gärtnerei keineswegs zufrieden" (WA II, 6:140; "My lady friends, who formerly had wanted to take me away from lonely mountains and from my study of lifeless stones, were...

О недавних русских переводах работ Соломона Маймона

О недавних русских переводах работ Соломона Маймона

Salomon Maimons Maimonides-Rezeption im Kontext seiner Auseinandersetzung mit Kants Konzept der Dinge an sich1

Zusammenfassung The 18th century philosopher Salomon Maimon, who originated from a small village in Eastern Europe and who, despite having been destined to become a rabbi at a young age, emigrated to Berlin and other German locations to study philosophy, showed a strong bond to the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides, most obviously by his self selected surname. Besides this, Maimon’s philosophical works have been significantly influenced by the rationalistic philosophy and theology of Maimonides. Most importantly, Maimonides’ theory of divine reason, which in turn refers to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, is incorporated into the philosophy of Maimon, who decisively transformed this conception into his own notion of an infinite intellect. In this article, it shall be demonstrated that Maimon uses this concept, derived from Maimonides’ thought to a large extent, yet significantly differing from it in important aspects, to argue against Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy: At first by rejecting the Kantian dualism of sensibility and intellect, then by trying to uncover Kant’s notion of the thing in itself as meaningless and eventually by trying to eliminate this notion from the system of transcendental philosophy in general. To present this specific constellation of argumentation, at first Maimon’s reception of central Maimonidean thoughts shall be examined in a strongly selective manner. In a second step, the application of these thoughts to the difficulties of Kant’s philosophy by Maimon has to be drafted. By inquiring the multifaceted relation of Maimon to the medieval philosopher in these important aspects, Maimonides’ particular relevance for German philosophy in the late 18th century shall be revealed.

Maimona teoria pochodnych a możliwość zastosowania czystych pojęć do przedmiotów empirycznych (przekład i opracowanie: Adam Grzeliński)

The paper translated and edited by Adam Grzeliński, Nicoalus Copernicus University in Toruń, grzelinski@wp.pl The article reconstructs the Salomon Maimon’s critique of Immanuel Kant’s doctrine concerning the applicability of pure intellectual concepts to empirical objects. According to Maimon, Kant’s standpoint is insufficient as a purely formal one; it explains how categories can be applied to experience in general, but it does not provide any explication of how determinate objects can be subsumed under categories. It is possible, Maimon claims, only if the two elements of cognition, pure concepts and empirical objects, are understood as effects of the spontaneity of human reason. The relation between the rule generating the matter of appearances and the matter itself can be exemplified by the relation between a function and its differentials. However, since the rule can be known only by a supposed absolute reason, Maimon is forced to define his standpoint as empirical scepticism.

Subjetividad, determinabilidad y reciprocidad en Maimon y Fichte

The aim of this paper is to inquire into a possible implicit influence of the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790) of Salomon Maimon on the Foundations of the Science of Knowledge (1794/95) of Johann G. Fichte. On the one hand, Fichte gives great importance to Maimon’s criticism towards the kantian separation between phenomena and thing-in-itself; on the other hand, Maimon’s skeptical challenge is a position against which Fichte reacts in his ‘94/95 work.In order to determine this influence we will focus in two specific concepts which are present in both thinker’s systems: the laws of determinability and of reciprocal determination. While Maimon grants a privilege to the first of these concepts to explain the transcendental synthesis of real thinking, Fichte favors the second one. The result is a divergence between both systems regarding their point of view on the structure of subjectivity. We will argue that Maimon remains on the cognitional reason viewpoint, from where he sees subjectivity as divided in a finite and an infinite understanding. On the contrary, Fichte’s perspective is that of practical reason, where the conflict between finite and infinite is internalized in the production of every single real determination.

Retrato filosófico de Salomon Maimon: crítica a Kant e retomada da metafísica do infinito

The aim of this paper is to outline how Salomon Maimon (1753-1800), based on a resumption of elements of pre-Kantian philosophy, especially Espinosa and Leibniz, criticizes the Kantian solution to the problem of grounding the objective validity of our knowledge and, within this criticism, explains in an original way how the knowledge is justified. It is an original way because Maimon takes up the demand from the point of view of the infinite, but falls not into the illusions of the transcendental appearance denounced by the Kantian Critique, so that he is at the same time, so to speak, pre- and post-Kantian - something that is expressed by the given characterization by Maimon himself to his “system”: “empirical skepticism, dogmatic rationalism”. It is, therefore, a contribution to the understanding of Maimon's philosophy.

The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature by Kirsch Adam (review)

The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature Peter Heinegg Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, journalist, and director of the M.A. program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University. The task he undertakes here—a comprehensive survey of Jewish writing from the Bible to the twentieth century—is clearly impossible, especially since he's aiming at readers unfamiliar or marginally familiar with this mountain of material. And what polymathic prodigy could do full justice to all these diverse texts? No matter: despite some rough edges, Kirsch's fly‐over reveals many expansive vistas that are well worth the trip. Of course, the choice of readings is bound to be problematic. Kirsch comments on excerpts from eighteen sources (not coincidentally, in gematria 18 = “life”): Deuteronomy, the Book of Esther, Philo of Alexandria's Exposition of the Law, Josephus’ Jewish War, the Talmudic tractate Chapters of the Fathers, Benjamin of Tudela's Itinerary and Yehuda Halevi's Kuzari, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, the Zohar, the Tsenerene and the Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln, Spinoza's Theological‐Political Treatise, the Autobiography of Solomon Maimon and Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, the Tales of Nachman of Bratslav, Theodor Herzl's Jewish State and Old New Land, and finally Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman. Whew. But no prophets, major or minor? No Job or Psalms? No Joseph Caro? No Moses Luzzatto? No Heine, Peretz, Kafka, or Buber? (Qoheleth answered this objection in advance, when he said (12.12), “Of making many books there is no end.”) Kirsch's treasure trove naturally defies summary, although he maintains it can be reduced to four basic themes: God, the Torah, the Land of Israel, and the Jewish people—a sound, if predictable, set of guidelines. But what the newcomer might find more surprising‐provocative is the almost unrelenting contradictoriness of the authors, who are constantly at odds with their heritage, with one another, and sometimes with themselves. Judaism may have a recognizable central vision (or visions); but it has no party line; and a lively dissonance, rather than tame harmony, is its signature. The trouble, or beauty of it all, begins in Deuteronomy (Greek for “second law” or “repetition of the law”). The text, or key parts of it, seems to be the “scroll” discovered by the high priest Hilkiah in the Temple during the reign of Josiah (622 BCE). The king is horrified because it reveals a body of law that the nation had been violating for centuries, in particular the foundational ban on idolatry. So forgetful had Israel, now reduced to the southern kingdom of Judah, become that it no longer even kept the Passover. How could this catastrophic state of oblivion have come about, since Moses had thundered so forcefully (e.g., in Dt. 13) against worshiping false gods and delivered such precise directions for celebrating the Passover (in Ex. 12—even before the event had occurred)? No explanation is given for this; but Kirsch calls Josiah's astonished encounter with the Torah the beginning of Jewish history. If so, it was a rather dark beginning; because the ferocious campaign the king subsequently led against Canaanite religion, destroying pagan shrines (the “high places”) and butchering their priests, proved to be of no long‐term avail. A generation after Josiah's death (609 BCE) the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem (586 BCE) and took the “cream” of the population off to exile in Babylon. Righteous as he was, Josiah's good deeds weighed less in the Lord's scale than the horrific crimes of his grandfather Manasseh (697–642 BCE), which included child sacrifice, and which ultimately doomed the country to its downfall (whence the perpetually nagging issue of corporate guilt). In one final insult, Josiah himself had been assured by the prophetess Huldah (2 Kings 22.20) that he would be “gathered to his grave in peace.” But in fact Josiah was slain in battle at Megiddo by the Pharaoh Neco. Back to Deuteronomy. In his last sermons to the Israelites supposedly gathered in the fields of Moab, Moses issues a vehement warning about what would later be called the Deuteronomic Principle: following the Law guarantees prosperity, breaking it brings disaster. The...

Salomon Maimon on the Form of Thought and Consciousness

Salomon Maimon on the Form of Thought and Consciousness

Recovering the ‘True Meaning’ of the Pre-Established Harmony: On a Neglected Key to Kant’s Theory of Intuition

Abstract:The paper discusses Kant’s enigmatic claim that his critical philosophy succeeds in articulating a philosophical insight at which Leibniz’s pre-established harmony was ‘truly’ aimed. Kant makes the claim in response to Salomon Maimon’s (mis)reading of his Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, which involves, in Kant’s words, the untenable assumption of a capacity of divine (intuitive) understanding in humans. The paper argues that Maimon’s misreading of Kant’s account of human intuition has found influential followers in contemporary Kant scholarship and that it is based on a failure to distinguish between what Kant calls “mere sensible appearances” and real phenomena of nature. While the former are entirely sensible singularities without unity, the latter are units composed of infinitely many sensible appearances, and their unity requires understanding. Kant thus appeals to a refurbished version of Leibniz’s pre-established harmony of mind and world, which takes the form of an immanent, indubitable, but ultimately inexplicable harmony of the faculties of sensibility and understanding. The paper includes a reconstruction of both the B-Deduction’s argument and the role of transcendental imagination in the proof.

The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera's Kabbalah on Spinoza's Metaphysics by Miquel Beltràn

Reviewed by: The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera's Kabbalah on Spinoza's Metaphysics by Miquel Beltràn Yitzhak Y. Melamed Miquel Beltràn. The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera's Kabbalah on Spinoza's Metaphysics. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. vi + 449. Cloth, $218.00. Addressing the alleged "great secrets" contained in Scripture, Spinoza wrote in the Theological Political Treatise (TTP): "I have also read, and for that matter, known personally, certain Kabbalistic triflers. I've never been able to be sufficiently amazed by their madness" (TTP chapter 9, Gebhardt III/136/1–2). Were these words Spinoza's only reference to the Kabbalah, we would hardly have any reason to believe that his attitude toward the Kabbalistic literature was anything but dismissive. However, in a 1675 letter to Henry Oldenburg, Spinoza stressed that he shared the view that "all things are in God" with certain ancient traditions (traditionibus) of the Hebrews, "corrupted as they have been in many ways" (Epistle 73, Gebhardt IV/307/11). Since the very meaning of the word 'Kabbalah' in Hebrew is tradition, and since the view of the Kabbalah as a corpus of ancient wisdom that got corrupted was widespread among early modern writers, it is highly likely that Spinoza's claims in the letter to Oldenburg referred to Kabbalistic pantheism (which was the main current within Kabbalistic thought). The precise nature of Spinoza's relation to the Kabbalah has been subject to debate and speculation ever since Wachter's 1699 Spinozismus in Jüdenthumb; and the list of luminaries who took part in this debate include Leibniz, F. H. Jacobi, Salomon Maimon, Schelling, Gershom Scholem, Zev Harvey, and Moshe Idel. The main common feature that Spinoza's [End Page 544] metaphysics shares with Kabbalistic theory is the combination of pantheism and emanation. Furthermore, some Kabbalists conceived the flow of things from the Einsof (the infinite) as strictly necessary. We may also note the significant presence of Kabbalistic works in Spinoza's personal library. Miquel Beltràn's new book is an important contribution to this three-centuries-old debate. The book focuses on Spinoza's relation to the writing of the major Kabbalist of early modern Amsterdam, Abraham Cohen de Herrera (1562(?)–1635). Though Herrera's books were not in Spinoza's library, there are intriguing thematic similarities between his synthesis of Renaissance philosophy and Kabbalah on the one hand, and Spinoza's metaphysics on the other. Beltràn's book is very clear and highly erudite. It relies upon, and engages in, a critical dialogue with the recent wave of studies and translations of Herrera's books, and it is clearly the most comprehensive study of the topic. Some of Beltràn's claims are quite surprising. Thus, for example, he argues that Spinoza's 1656 excommunication was partly due to his interpretation of Herrera's works (44), and that natura naturans "does not refer to substance as substance, but rather as a free cause of that which follows from its nature" (377). The scope of Beltràn's study is quite wide, covering diverse issues such as amor Dei intellectualis, the notion of causa sui, the nature of the attributes, infinity, and acosmism. The book also contains some insightful discussions of Spinoza's reception of Maimonides and of Wachter's reading of Spinoza. Every so often, I found myself in disagreement with the author, but this is a rich, stimulating, and even exciting work, and is clearly one that should be addressed and studied by anyone with a serious interest in Spinoza's relation to the Kabbalah. Yitzhak Y. Melamed Johns Hopkins University Copyright © 2017 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.

Do They Contradict Themselves? Very Well Then They Contradict Themselves

Do They Contradict Themselves? Very Well Then They Contradict Themselves Peter Heinegg The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature. By Adam Kirsch, New York: Norton, 2016. xxii + 407 pp. $28.95. Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, journalist, and director of the M.A. program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University. The task he undertakes here—a comprehensive survey of Jewish writing from the Bible to the twentieth century—is clearly impossible, especially since he's aiming at readers unfamiliar or marginally familiar with this mountain of material. And what polymathic prodigy could do full justice to all these diverse texts? No matter: Despite some rough edges, Kirsch's flyover reveals many expansive vistas that are well worth the trip. Of course, the choice of readings is bound to be problematic. Kirsch comments on excerpts from eighteen sources (not coincidentally, in gematria 18 = “life”): Deuteronomy, the Book of Esther, Philo of Alexandria's Exposition of the Law, Josephus’ Jewish War, the Talmudic tractate Chapters of the Fathers, Benjamin of Tudela's Itinerary and Yehuda Halevi's Kuzari, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, the Zohar, the Tsenerene and the Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln, Spinoza's Theological‐Political Treatise, the Autobiography of Solomon Maimon and Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, the Tales of Nachman of Bratslav, Theodor Herzl's Jewish State and Old New Land, and finally Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman. Whew. But no prophets, major or minor? No Job or Psalms? No Joseph Caro? No Moses Luzzatto? No Heine, Peretz, Kafka, or Buber? (Qoheleth answered this objection in advance, when he said (12.12), “Of making many books there is no end.”) Kirsch's treasure trove naturally defies summary, although he maintains, it can be reduced to four basic themes: God, the Torah, the Land of Israel, and the Jewish people—a sound, if predictable, set of guidelines. But what the newcomer might find more surprising‐provocative is the almost unrelenting contradictoriness of the authors, who are constantly at odds with their heritage, with one another, and sometimes with themselves. Judaism may have a recognizable central vision (or visions), but it has no party line, and a lively dissonance, rather than tame harmony, is its signature. The trouble, or beauty of it all, begins in Deuteronomy (Greek for “second law” or “repetition of the law”). The text, or key parts of it, seems to be the “scroll” discovered by the high priest Hilkiah in the Temple during the reign of Josiah (622 BCE). The king is horrified because it reveals a body of law that the nation had been violating for centuries, in particular the foundational ban on idolatry. So forgetful had Israel, now reduced to the southern kingdom of Judah, become that it no longer even kept the Passover. How could this catastrophic state of oblivion have come about, since Moses had thundered so forcefully (e.g., in Dt. 13) against worshiping false gods and delivered such precise directions for celebrating the Passover (in Ex. 12—even before the event had occurred)? No explanation is given for this, but Kirsch calls Josiah's astonished encounter with the Torah the beginning of Jewish history. If so, it was a rather dark beginning, because the ferocious campaign the king subsequently led against Canaanite religion, destroying pagan shrines (the “high places”) and butchering their priests, proved to be of no long‐term avail. A generation after Josiah's death (609 BCE), the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem (586 BCE) and took the cream of the population off to exile in Babylon. Righteous as he was, Josiah's good deeds weighed less in the Lord's scale than the horrific crimes of his grandfather Manasseh (697–642 BCE), which included child sacrifice, and which ultimately doomed the country to its downfall (whence the perpetually nagging issue of corporate guilt). In one final insult, Josiah himself had been assured by the prophetess Huldah (2 Kings 22.20) that he would be “gathered to his grave in peace.” But in fact Josiah was slain in battle at Megiddo by the Pharaoh Neco. Back to Deuteronomy. In his last sermons to the Israelites supposedly gathered in the fields of Moab, Moses issues a...

Stosunek Salomona Majmona do filozofii Kanta (w świetle korespondencji i nowo odkrytego manuskryptu Rozmowa pomiędzy Kantem i jednym z jego uczniów)

The article familiarizes us with Salomon Maimon (1754–1800), a self-taught philosopher of Jewish descent, and with his attitude to the scientific views of Immanuel Kant. Although Maimon depicted himself as a follower of Kant, the reality contradicts this picture. The conclusions drawn in the article are based on Maimon’s letters and his manuscript of A Dialogue between Kant and One of His Students discovered only recently. The abovementioned correspondence with Kant clearly shows Maimon’s position in relation to the views of the philosopher from Konigsberg. The letters, most of which remained unanswered, are written in a characteristic, somewhat audacious manner. Maimon begins them with glorifying Kant’s philosophy but then suggests numerous corrections concerning not only its insignificant details but also some principal issues which would radically change the whole system of Kant’s philosophy. Presumably that justifies the fact that Maimon received but one answer in the whole correspondence. Kant answered it at the instigation of his friend, Marcus Herz, with whom Maimon won favour. Later, however, Kant bore a grudge against Herzto such an extent that their own correspondence, previously frequent and very personal in character, almost ceased, becoming scarce and official. This, however, did not discourage Maimon, who in his Autobiography (1792) claimed that Kant had a high regard of him. The Jewish self-taught philosopher kept writing letters to Kant, and as he could not bear the lack of any answer, he decided to respond to the lettershimself. Kant’s would-be answers are contained in the abovementioned manuscript of A Dialogue between Kant and One of His Students , which for Maimon was a kind of compensation for Kant’s repudiation. Thetitle dialogue is between the Konigsberg philosopher and a student N, whose views are identical with those of Maimon. It is hard to overlook the importunity of his attacks on Kant, whose answers are far more polite perhaps due to the fact he cannot equal him. In the dialogue, Kant contradicts himself, is lost in the arguments, and finally agrees with the statements of N despite the fact that they are quite distant from his own critical philosophy. N – that is Maimon – casts doubts concerning various aspects of Kant’s philosophy, e.g. the notion of space as a form of pure intuition, and Kant’s attempts to defend his position are quite helpless. Frequent statements such as “I do not know” or “highly probable” compound Maimon’s picture of Kant. It turns out, however, that in some of the theses contained in the dialogue Maimon was close the views of Fichte, which Kant refused as well. Perhaps, then, Maimon was a link between Kantian philosophy and the classical German idealism, a link much more important than it is generally acknowledged.

Heidegger’s Jewish Conceptions of Being, Language, and Time

The aim of this paper is to consider ways that Heidegger’s thinking relates to some main lines of traditional Jewish thought. Following Heidegger’s own hermeneutical principle of trying to think what an author leaves unthought, Marlene Zarader took up a similar line of consideration in her aptly named work, La dette impensée: Heidegger et l’heritage hébraique. Zarader’s work has come in for at least two sorts of criticism. She has been criticized for (a) leaving the impression that there is a single Hebraic tradition to which Heidegger’s debt can be traced and (b) largely restricting her account of that tradition to twentieth century scholars (notably, Scholem). In my opinion, these criticisms, though not without merit, overreach. Still, while such considerations mitigate the force of these criticisms, they do so by conceding that they have a point. Accordingly, the present paper is meant to serve as a complement to Zarader’s project, in light of these criticisms. In the interest of indicating how Heidegger’s thinking echoes various Hebraic traditions, I discuss three distinct sources of those echoes: Maimonides’ negative theology, Mendelssohn’s conception of language (as it contrasts with Solomon Maimon’s conception), and the messianic idea of the Lurianic Kabbalastic tradition.

La influencia de Salomon Maimon en el pensamiento de Gilles Deleuze

In the present article we will try to provide a reading of Salomon Maimon’s work, with the aim of shedding light on some of the central issues the Deleuzian thought envisaged in the period of philosophical production that is accomplished with the publication of Difference and Repetition. To do this we will, at first, give an overview of the Maimonian thought, drawing the necessary comparisons with the Kantian concepts and trying to account both for their points of contact and their possible divergences. In a second stage we will make a double movement: on the one hand we will try to problematize some of Maimon’s concepts, while on the other hand we will seek to show in what sense these tensions may open to specifically Deleuzian questions. Finally, we will exhibit some characters of the Deleuzian Idea and other concepts related to it, highlighting the constraints of which they part and the novel solutions they provide.

O nieateistycznym i akosmicznym charakterze panteistycznej filozofii Spinozy według Salomona Majmona

On the Non-atheistic and Acosmic Character of Pantheistic Philosophy of Spinoza According to Salomon Maimon The article presents Salomon Maimon’s view on the pantheistic philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and Maimon’s conviction that the system in question cannot be defined as atheism. The Jewish thinker (a Pole by birth) states that Spinozian philosophy should be rather called acosmism which term is suggested by Maimon due to the fact that this system of thought affirms the sole reality of God (what also does the pantheism) – what, on the other hand, denies the credibility of defining Spinoza’s philosophy as atheism. However, the article shows that the more addequate term with regard to the pantheistic philosophy of Spinoza would be pancosmism. The last seems to better correspond to the theses of pantheism – the determinant common for both the pantheism and pancosmism (at the same time not exemplaristic for acosmism) is namely the real (actual) status of (divine) reality.

Reconciling Leibnizian Monadology and Kantian Criticism

This paper (written for the ‘300 Year's of Leibniz's Monadology' conference) explores systematic parallels between the criticisms of Kantian cognitive dualism provided by Salomon Maimon within his 'Essay on Transcendental Philosophy' of 1790 and F.W.J. Schelling within his 'General Overview of the Most Recent Philosophical Literature' of 1797. It discusses how both Maimon and Schelling suggest that the difficulties with Kant's cognitive dualism are so severe that they can only be resolved by recourse to a Leibnizian position, in which sensibility and understanding, and matter and form, arise from one and the same cognitive source. It thus shows how Maimon and Schelling – within 1790 and 1797, respectively – sketch systems of transcendental philosophy explicitly modelled on the Leibnizian philosophy, which both of them interpret as claiming that God is immanently contained within the human soul.

Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt by Saul Friedländer (review)

Reviewed by: Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt by Saul Friedländer Paul North Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt By Saul Friedländer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. The series of little books, "Jewish Lives," would have interested Kafka. Although he preferred autobiographies, letter collections, and journals—lives [End Page 148] from the pen of those who lived them—it was a keen pleasure and a somewhat urgent need for him, throughout his life, to vacation in the lives of others. He reread and recommended to family and friends life-writing by Dostoyevsky, the proto-feminist and socialist Lily Braun, Salomon Maimon, and many others. At one point he developed a little theory of the effect of this type of "life-reading." One reads these things not in order to confirm one's convictions, not in order to find kindred spirits or to discover how a genius became what he is. One does it for what happens afterwards, "when, by closing the book, one is brought back to oneself again after this excursion and this rest and recuperation, one feels healthy again in one's newly discovered, newly shaken-up very own being, after beholding it for a mere instant from a distance, and which now stays at home, but with a freer head." Estrange yourself in another and you will open a space beyond yourself in your self. Saul Friedländer's latest addition to the "Jewish Lives" series does not hold back from analyzing the truly strange vacation one takes in Kafka's life. I say it analyzes, and this mode has the effect of both showcasing its strangeness and in certain ways taming it. The book is a perfect introduction to Kafka's relationships with women, with his father, with Jews, Jewishnesses, and Judaistic religions. It should become the first place students in college courses or the general public get an immediate sense of how Kafka is being read by scholars now. The old categories—death, fear, God, sin—and the somewhat newer ones—language, law, power, authority—are gone, or almost. In their place is a Kafka for the present day, caught in a net of ambivalences toward ethnic, gender, political, and aesthetic denominations. The new categories—Prague, Sons and Fathers, Jewishness, Sex, Writing, and Meaning—leave room for many of the complexities and indeed paradoxes of Kafka's positions. Friedländer does not let a single contrary fact go unremarked. He shows how complicated it was to call yourself "Jew" in Prague at this time, but he never tries to name once and for all Kafka's position vis-à-vis Jewishness in all its modalities—Zionist, eastern European, religious, secular, assimilated, cultural Zionist, anti-Zionist, and the list goes on. In effect Kafka is the perfect expression of the crisis and the real opening in the concept, insofar as he refuses to commit to any one of the modalities. Things are a bit less open in the chapter on "The Son." Friedländer acknowledges the historical schism that separated Jewish sons from their fathers. Kafka's father had to forge a career by compromising [End Page 149] on Jewishness, while Kafka, with a college education and a job working for the state, could afford, like some of his writer and artist friends, to reassess how Jewish he could and wanted to be. Regarding his attitude toward his father, a rather moralistic tone creeps in. "On occasion, indeed, Franz's complaints are literally hard to comprehend" (26). The father is normal, the son abnormal. Friedländer attributes the complaints about his father ultimately to an oedipal struggle (32). The early stories "The Judgment" and "The Metamorphosis" he sees as representation of it. But in fact the stories do not fit this Freudian mold. In neither is the son a rival for the mother's affections; in this regard, and perhaps only in this regard, Deleuze and Guattari were right. What they call anti-oedipal, and I would call non-oedipal, is more explanatory. In any case, these stories have little or nothing to do with the inner workings of the psyche. Even if...

Empiricism and Rationalism: The Failure of Kant’s Synthesis and its Consequences for German Philosophy around 1800

AbstractKant’s synthesis of empiricism and rationalism is often considered to be one of his most important contributions to philosophy. In this article I investigate the reception of this synthesis in the late 1780s and early 1790s. I show that during this early reception Kant’s attempt at a synthesis, and its empiricist side in particular, proved to be a failure when it was confronted with a powerful challenge from the side of Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Salomon Maimon and Karl Leonhard Reinhold. This failure, I argue, resulted in a break within the Kantian movement itself between a rationalist and an empiricist Kantianism

The Spinozistic Path to Skepticism in advance

The Absolute Idealism that arose in the 1790s is often seen as an attempt to combine elements of Fichte and Spinoza in order to overcome the various dualisms that lie at the heart of Kant’s Critical Idealism. What is less recognized is that a peculiar form of skepticism also emerged from a commitment to Spinozistic rationalism, and in this paper I explore how both Salomon Maimon and Novalis can be fruitfully seen as apostate rationalists, who are led to a distinctive skeptical position by way of Spinoza.

Salomon Maimon has a Memorial

Salomon Maimon has a Memorial