Maimon’s Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking

This is the first English translation of Salomon Maimon’s Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking, originally published in Berlin in 1794. Maimon came from an impoverished yet culturally rich Lithuanian Jewish background to write brilliantly speculative philosophy in Germany in the immediate wake of Immanuel Kant’s revolutionary Critique of Pure Reason. His passionate search for the truth quickly led him to try to complete Kant’s conceptual system in ways that inspired Fichte’s philosophy of the transcendental self and anticipated Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies of the world-soul. However, Maimon grew beyond these initial ideas to develop a sophisticated philosophy of reflection. He argued that philosophical knowledge must arise from reflection on the principles of valid cognition. In the New Logic, he conducts this reflection and develops from it systematic accounts of logic, cognition, scientific methodology, and metaphysics. He presents it as a unified improvement of Kant’s Critique. Maimon also based his mature philosophies of ethics, natural rights, aesthetics, and religion on this work. Timothy Franz translates the New Logic along with the Letters of Philalethes to Aenesidemus, in which Maimon imagined conversations with his contemporaries, two hostile reviews which Maimon vigorously annotated, and relevant letters to Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte. Franz prefaces the text with a new history of Maimon’s intellectual development, an introduction that relates the New Logic to contemporary Kant scholarship, and a detailed philosophical commentary that attempts to reconcile Maimon’s idiosyncratically disjointed writing style with his underlying systematic vision, making the New Logic available for further study.