Salomon Maimon’s revision of the kantian table of categories

Abstract

In a 1794 book on logic, Salomon Maimon presented a new table of categories that was meant
to replace Kant’s as discussed in his Critique of Pure Reason. I see it as the last stage of an evolution of
Maimon’s view on the subject. In light of a general understanding of Maimon’s epistemological stance,
I trace this particular development of his thought from his earliest German work, the Transcendental
Philosophy (1789), to his aforementioned Logic and divide it into four sections. In the first two, I portray
Maimon’s position as conforming to the Kantian paradigm according to which the categories depend on
the logical forms of judgment. In the third one, I explain Maimon’s inversion of such paradigm in his
commentary to Aristotle’s Categories. In the last section, I find Maimon’s last version of the table of
categories to be an expression of the overall improvement of his theory of knowledge. Finally, I argue
for a broader understanding of several key notions of his philosophical system which, in my opinion,
could be of assistance in the task of fruitfully interpreting his work.