Journal of the History of Philosophy

470 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon. By Samuel Hugo Bergrnan. Trans. Noah J. Jaeobs. (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1967. Pp. xvii +326. $7.50) Solomon Malmon himself contributed greatly, by his Autobiography, to the mistaken and misleading estimate of his career that has prevailed since his own age. He was, indeed, a picaresque figure and his widely read hook stressed the shabby and romantic aspects of his life, but scarcely those qualities that would lead students of philosophy to a re-examination of his place in eighteenth-century thought. It comes as something of a surprise to learn that he was the author of eight books and fourteen articles on philosophic subjects as well as the editor of annotated German translations of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum and Henry Pemberton's View of the Newtonian Philosophy. All of these works, as well as the Autobiography, were published between 1789 and 1801; in this last decade of his life, at least, Maimon could scarcely be considered a vagabond. Samuel Hugo Bergman, distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has devoted many years to the rehabilitation of Maimon's philosophic reputation. In 1932 Bergman published (in Hebrew) a version of the study that is before us; in 1967 was published the revised and substantially enlarged Hebrew edition from which this translation into English was made. In addition, Dr. Bergman wrote several articles on special phases of Maimon's thought and (with his colleague, Nathan Rotenstreich) translated Maimon's Versuch iiber.die Transcendentalphilosophie into Hebrew and edited Maimon's Hebrew commentary on Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed. During the years of Dr. Bergman's studies of Maimon, a fair number of other studies and textual editions have been published by others, including an excellent study by Samuel Atlas, From Critical to Speculative Idealism: The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon (The Hague, 1964) and an essay by David Baumgardt on 'q'he Ethics of Salomon Maimon" which appeared in the first volume of The dournal of the History of Philosophy. Noah J. Jacobs, the English translator of Bergman's book, has also performed the service of preparing "An Annotated Bibliography of Maimon," in Kir]ath Sepher, XLI (1966), 245-262. There is no longer any adventitious excuse for the historian of philosophy to remain in ignorance of the contributions of this contemporary of Kant to the movement of German thought inhis time. Maimon's position, as presented in the first nine chapters of Bergman's book, involves a return, in the full light of the Kantian critique, to a Leibnizian position, avoiding the cognitive dualism latent in Kant and become patent in Jacobi and Schuize by arguing that although "our representations are related to the thing-in-itself, that is, to something that is totally different from themselves, this something, however, although independent of the representations that are related to it is not independent of the faculty of cognition" (quoted from Maimon's Versuch einer neuen Logik oder Theorie des Denkens, p. 368, by Bergman, p. 14). Instead of two worlds, one phenomenal and the other noumenal, Maimon includes both phenomenon and noumenon as aspects of knowledge. Noumenon ("object,.... thing-in-itself,) is phenomenon ("representation") as it would appear to an infinite mind; i.e., as in Leibniz, the infinite mind is introduced as a methodological device for defining the relation of phenomenon and noumenon. The representation is an incomplete object in finite consciousness, but complete and identical with the object in an infinite consciousness. From this point, Maimon moves to the reconsideration of the categories, continuing to accept and follow the critical side of Kant's thought, but to replace the Kantian reconstruction by one of his own. BOOK REVIEWS 471 The sources suggested by Bergraan for Maimon's positive philosophy arc many, though he admits that Maimon may not have been explicitly aware of all of them (e.g., Nicholas of Cusa). Chapters X and XI examine in detail Maimon's indebtedness to two of his predecessors, Moses Maimonides and Baruch Spinoza. The final three chapters argue for certain influences of Maimon on Fichte, possible influences of Maimon on Hegel and similarities between...