Maimonides’ Paradox, Transcendental Metaphysics and the Impossibility of Judgment in Salomon Maimon’s Early German Writings

Abstract In this paper I study Salomon Maimon’s twofold engagement with an alleged absurdity according to which what makes experience possible formally must also be presupposed materially as a content of experience leading to an infinite regress similar to what Maimonides had discovered several centuries earlier in an ancient proposition from the Mishna. I examine Maimon’s various solutions (transcendental and deflationary) from 1789 to 1794 to argue that, despite his strenuous efforts, a revaluation of the metaphysical underpinnings of transcendental philosophy seems justified.