Salomon Maimon and Transcendental Philosophy

Abstract

The text examines Solomon Maimon's critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy. This critique is broken down into two questions: On the one hand, Maimon questions whether there is objective experience, understood as a connection of representations based on a priori rules (quid facti?). On the other hand, there is a question about the validity of the law, the justification of synthetic a priori judgments as conditions of possibility necessary to think objectively, and our judgments of experience (quid iuris?). These questions have contributed to forming the image of Maimon as a sceptic against the very project of transcendental philosophy. In contrast, the article suggests that Maimon is not entirely against transcendental philosophy but against how Kant formulates it. Maimon argues that the distinction between understanding and sensibility cannot be conceived as a distinction between consciousness and what lies outside of consciousness, so by his doctrine of "differentials" (whereby sensibility be understood as the process of determination that makes a concept intelligible) he attempts to posit a transcendental philosophy for which the quid iuris question is interpreted as the question about how the world arises out of a complete and total determining activity of thought.