Essay on Transcendental Philosophy

Description

Essay on Transcendental Philosophy presents the first English translation of Salomon Maimon's principal work, originally published in Berlin in 1790. In this book, Maimon seeks to further the revolution in philosophy wrought by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by establishing a new foundation for transcendental philosophy in the idea of difference. Kant judged Maimon to be his most profound critic, and the Essay went on to have a decisive influence on the course of post-Kantian German Idealism. A more recent admirer was Gilles Deleuze who drew on Maimon's Essay in constructing his own philosophy of difference. This long-overdue translation makes Maimon's brilliant analysis and criticism of Kant's philosophy accessible to an English readership for the first time. The text includes a comprehensive introduction, a glossary, translators' notes, a bibliography of writings on Maimon and an index. It also includes translations of correspondence between Maimon and Kant and a letter Maimon wrote to a Berlin journal clarifying the philosophical position of the essay, all of which bring the book's context alive for the modern reader.

Salomon Maimon (1754-1800) was a German philosopher and one of the most important Jewish intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Described by Kant as 'my harshest critic', Maimon had an enormous influence on post-Kantian German idealism, as well as on modern Continental philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze. Alistair Welchman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio, USA. He is the co-translator of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation (CUP, forthcoming). Henry Somers-Hall is Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He has published several articles on Gilles Deleuze's relationship to Kant, phenomenology and mathematics. Mergen Reglitz is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. Nick Midgley is an independent scholar based in London, UK. He co-translated Habermas's 'Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism' in The New Schelling, ed. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (Continuum, 2004).

[T]his is a remarkable accomplishment which will hopefully set standards for future work on Maimon, both in quality and ... also in the all too rare cooperation between scholars to which this edition testifies. * Kant studien *