Idealistic Studies

Volume 42, Issue 2/3, Summer/Fall 2012

Salomon Maimon on Intellectual Intuition

One of the problems in post-Kantian discussions is the way in which the self procures access to itself. Kant rejects intellectual intuition in human knowledge. Nonetheless, he supposes an access of the self to itself as subject in all conscious knowledge. It is then fitting to ask how this access can occur. Because, if the self is to be taken precisely as subject, in other words as an activity that knows objects, this knowledge of the self should be of a different kind to that in which all the objects already constituted by that activity are known. Fichte or Schelling are usually taken to be the first to have addressed and tried to solve this problem. But Salomon Maimon had already done so in 1789 and had proposed a solution based on intellectual intuition. The aim of this article is to reconstruct Maimon’s arguments, evaluate his proposal, and specifically show that his attempt is the first in which the Kantian problem is addressed and a solution put forward.