Maimon, Salomon

Maimon, Salomon (mī`môn), c.1754–1800, German philosopher, b. Polish Lithuania. He received a Jewish religious education and was influenced by the Talmudic tradition and particularly by Maimonides. Wandering through Germany, he reached Berlin c.1779 and later went to school in Hamburg. An important critic of Immanuel Kant, Maimon argued that the "thing in itself" was to be understood not as an external entity underlying phenomena but as something residing in consciousness, a limit of the possible cognition of an object. Maimon posited the idea of an infinite reason, which he sometimes understood as a limit of understanding but tended to regard as an ontological entity.

Bibliography

See his autobiography (tr. by J. C. Murray, 1946); studies by S. Atlas (1964) and S. H. Bergman (tr. 1967).

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Maimon, Salomon

 orig. Salomon ben Joshua

(born c. 1754, Nieswiez, grand duchy of Lithuania—died Nov. 22, 1800, Nieder-Siegersdorf, Silesia) Polish Jewish philosopher. As a young man, he pursued Hebrew and rabbinic studies, adopting the name Maimon out of admiration for Moses Maimonides. His unorthodox commentaries on Maimonides earned him the enmity of other Jews, and he left Poland at age 25 to wander through Europe as a scholar and tutor. A skeptic who emphasized the limits of pure thought, he is best known for his Search for the Transcendental Philosophy (1790), a major critique of Kantian philosophy. His other writings include Philosophical Dictionary (1791) and Critical Investigations of the Human Spirit (1797).