Salomon Maimon (1753 – 1800)
Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) was born into a poor Jewish family in rural Lithuania. Obsessed from an early age by the desire to study philosophy, he rose to become a prominent figure in the German Enlightenment in Berlin. He is best known for his Autobiography which was translated into English in 1888 and recounts the life of a man willing to sacrifice the security of a career or steady income in order to read and write philosophy, even though forced at times to live as a beggar and a tramp. His first publication, the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy of 1790, marked the beginning of a decade in which he finally achieved recognition as a philosopher and during which he became editor of the first journal of empirical psychology and published numerous further philosophical works.
The Speakers
Paul Franks is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada, where he holds the Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy. He is recognised internationally as an expert on early German Idealism. He is the author of All or
Nothing: Skepticism, Transcendental Argument and Systematicity in German Idealism (Harvard University Press, 2005), coeditor of the International Yearbook of German Idealism, and author of numerous papers of Maimon’s philosophy.
Gideon Freudenthal is professor of philosophy of science at the University of Tel Aviv, Israel. He is a world expert on Salomon Maimon’s philosophy. He is the editor of Salomon Maimon. Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic (Kluwer, 2003), and author of Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton. On the Genesis of the Mechanistic World View (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1986).
Dr Beth Lord is Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee, UK. She has recently completed a book for Palgrave Macmillan connecting early German idealism to modern French philosophy, and is the co-editor of the Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy (Continuum, 2009).
The Organisers
Henry Somers-Hall is Senior Lecturer in philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is co-translator of Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy. His primary research interests are German Idealism, phenomenology, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
Nick Midgley is an independent scholar. He is co-translator of Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy.
