Dissertation
Fellow 2002-03
Florian Ehrensperger (Philosophy)
University of Munich
Salomon Maimon’s Doctrine
of Imagination
My dissertation explores the concept of imagination
in the philosophy of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800)—a highly influential
but insufficiently studied figure in both German idealism and romanticism,
as well as Jewish philosophy. Maimon was the first to emphasize the
role of the productive imagination in Kant, which then became a central
theme not only for Fichte but also for romanticism in general. However,
for Maimon, the role of imagination in the constitution of the objects
of ordinary knowledge-claims is part of an argument in favor of skepticism,
whereas for Fichte, imagination is part of a response to skepticism.
This relationship between Maimon and Fichte has not to date been fully
appreciated in current scholarship. A proper study would need to locate
Maimon within the tradition of Judaeo-Islamic prophetology—the
philosophical account of prophetic dreams and other forms of revelation.
Drawing on Aristotle’s account of imagination (phantasia) and
post-Aristotelian and neo-Platonic explanations of the mantic arts,
philosophers such as Alfarabi and Maimonides gave elaborate accounts
of the possibility of prophecy. It was already a matter of controversy
in the Middle Ages whether these accounts genuinely explained revelation
in a way that allowed it to retain its authority or whether they simply
explained revelation away. Maimon himself continued this tradition in
his contributions to the first journal of empirical psychology (Magazin
zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde), of which he was an editor. He also wrote
a comprehensive commentary on the main philosophical work of Maimonides,
The Guide of the Perplexed, which is mainly based on prophecy and imagination.
It seems to me that Maimon’s conception of imagination is an important
link between the epistemology of Kant and the speculative idealism of
Fichte and the Romantic esthetics.
|
