Abstract

Histories of philosophy generally jump from Kant directly to Fichte without mentioning Salomon Maimon; yet even Fichte wrote about his "unbounded admiration" toward the Jewish thinker. The present volume is a most welcome reprint of Maimon's principal work, out of print for over a century and a half, in which he tries to refute the very idea of a Ding-an-sich. It can be claimed that this same enterprise had been carried out more spectacularly and with greater originality and depth by Fichte; but it remains Maimon's great merit to have exorcised the spectre of the noumena operating from within the very framework of the Critique.—M. J. V.