In the first posting I did on Maimon and Kant on intuition I referred to a connection between Maimon's response to the status of "intuition" and the views more recently advanced by Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell. However, that posting grew so long that I was unable to come back to the views of Sellars and McDowell. In this posting I want to explore just some of the comments made by Wilfrid Sellars in the first chapter of his seminal work Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes.
The first chapter of Sellars' book opens by reporting Kant's heterogeneity thesis: namely, that there are two separate and distinct branches of cognition, namely, sensibility and understanding. Sellars relates this distinction directly to that between intuition and conceptuality and that between spontaneity and receptivity. Sellars aims to show that intuition has a double-aspect, in line with considerations we have been looking at in the last postings. The first argument to this effect concerns the way in which Kant describes concepts which is generally as a term for something general and not particular. On these grounds Sellars suggests a relationship between intuition and the presentation of individuals. However, the problem with such a view of intuition that Sellars considers, is to the effect that many particulars are clearly not of a sort to be presented as "intuitive". So, to incorporate this, Sellars points out that particulars are generally presented in such a way as to require mediation in their representation by concepts.
By contrast, with intuitions, Kant does specifically refer to the notion that there is something immediate about them. This claimed immediacy is something that is far from easy to understand and Sellars does not wish, at least at first, to endorse the conception that it should be understood as a causative claim (that is, that the presence of an intuition in a representation is brought about by something affecting the cogniser). Rather, Sellars' first suggestion is to the effect that the immediate particular that gets represented in an intuition is instead something that we should understand on the model of the "demonstrative this".
Now, if to represent an individual as a "this" is to be engaged immediately in an intuitive representation and yet the notion of such a "this" requires (as Hegel suggested in the "Introduction" to his Phenomenology) a basic conceptual relation, then this conceptual relation that is at work in the presentation of the "this" is one that belongs to the specific working of intuition. On these grounds, Sellars presents his first argument for thinking of intuition as, in some sense, conceptual. (Oddly, and more in keeping with Maimon, Sellars also refers to the way that Kant can include such a notion of an infinite intellect that is intuitive as an additional consideration for viewing intuitions as, in some way, capable of being comprehended conceptually though, unlike Maimon, Sellars does not develop this suspicion.)
Further considerations for approaching intuition in a manner which complicates the initial schematic representation of Kant's view quickly follow. Firstly, the representation of space is something that surely requires reference to understanding. This point is asserted and not yet argued. Secondly, the notion of the synthesis of imagination, implies a view of representing intuitions that involves some kind of meeting between spontaneity and receptivity and is certainly not a matter of what Sellars terms "sheer receptivity".
This conception of "sheer receptivity" is one that is not easy to work out the sense of in Sellars' use of it and I suspect I will need to say much more about it in future postings. Here it seems to be understood as the form of receptivity that involves no form of spontaneity. As such it appears that it would require a sense of "intuition" that is non-conceptual. So Sellars has now cashed out his view that there is a dual aspect to intuitions with one part being conceptual and one part not. The part which is conceptual would have to have a connection to judgment as is argued for in what I have elsewhere termed the "symmetry thesis" of the Metaphysical Deduction (A78-9/B103-4).
Sellars next compares the picture he has thus developed with the classic Aristotelian notion of abstraction pointing to the view that the judgment concerning an individual seems to arise from abstraction away from the individual presentation of something. In this case, unlike in the Aristotelian, the point would be that the individual intuitive presentation was itself already a result of active work and not something passively related to by the cognition.
However, despite the difference between the pictures, objections to the Aristotelian view surely resurface in slightly emended forms here. The suggestion that the presentation of a line, for example, emerges after the sense of the particular line has been given certainly seems implausible. Such a view certainly requires, at any rate, a strong commitment to the existence of a level of perception in which the determination of the "this" is working by means of something within the perception itself.
The connection of these reflections to Kant's argument arises from the point that "intuition" in Kant is, as pointed out by Henry Allison amongst others, at least distinguishable between the product of synthesis and a passive manifold towards which cognition is directed. This distinction is again related by Sellars to the difference between Kant's talk of a manifold of representations and the representation of a manifold. Whereas the latter involves synthesis the former may well not. (The explicit attention involved in the representation of a manifold as a manifold is something else entirely.)
Sellars now returns to his notion of "sheer receptivity" which appears to mark his view of what is at work in the manifold of representations being given to us. At this point Sellars assumes that this givenness by sheer receptivity is something that is simple and this suggestion appears to emerge from the sense that we are not here dealing with synthesis. Once synthesis emerges there is an evident complex but, in the absence of it, what need is there for a complex to be spoken of? That which appears to cognition without synthesis being needed ("sheer receptivity") would be a simple and so what is represented by means of it would also be simple. This equation is somewhat quick on Sellars' part since the means of representing may be simple without what is represented necessarily being so.
The case that begins now to be considered by Sellars is that of space which he argues cannot be given to "sheer receptivity" as a complex and, in arguing this, he relates the understanding of it to the notion that it is the form of "outer sense". Now, if space is part of sheer receptivity (intuitive in a non-conceptual sense) then, in being so part, it does not really fit with outer sense as such on Sellars' view. One reason is that such a simple form as would be given by space in this case is not fit to be the form of the representings of outer sense. If there is something given in outer sense then what is so given is surely not something that a simple mode of representing could capture and, because of this, it is also incapable of being what is represented by outer sense.
To be sure this does not directly tell against the view that space is the form of outer sense if we assume that space is an intuition of a conceptual sort but then it appears that space does not belong with "sheer receptivity" at all. This is the culmination of the first movement of Sellars' first chapter. Two questions arise from it: firstly, how does Sellars go on to account for intuition and, secondly, in what sense can the notion of "sheer receptivity" be shown to have a role in cognition? The latter question is one of some interest since it reflects a way of understanding the non-conceptual element of Kantian intuition, an element that we need some handle on.
The event of the week was certainly attending the one-day conference on Salomon Maimon that was staged at my own university, Manchester Metropolitan, this week. The event was organised in celebration of the translation of Maimon's Essay and it certainly revealed further reasons for taking Maimon seriously as a major philosopher.
The opening speech was given by Bruce Rosenstock who spoke about the topic of creatio ex nihilo as a key element of belief, as articulated by Moses Maimonides (from whom Maimon takes his name). However, Maimon takes the advent of Newtonian science to have ruled out the possibility of belief in such a thing. Interestingly, Maimon compares Maimonides' belief in creatio ex nihilo to the position of Kant since Kant left open the possibility of creation as an hypothesis.
Rosenstock mentioned further that Wittgenstein's Tractatus also adopted the view that Newtonian science is a unitary whole but does so by maintaining an external vantage on the world that allows us to see its existence as "mystical". Maimon, by contrast, wished to annul this notion of the "mystical" and the miraculous sense of things that is at work in the conception of creatio ex nihilo.
Rosenstock also spoke about Jacobi, mentioning how, for Jacobi, the consciousness of the object and of the self are given together in a flash. Neither, for Jacobi, are inferences. Consciousness, for Jacobi, is the revelation of the existence of these two inter-related forces which are grounded, for him, on the immediacy of revelation. However, Jacobi does not allow variation of forces between bodies and thus he has to make a hash of Newtonian physics. Force varies with regard to consciousness for Jacobi but he can make no real sense of relations between bodies.
The chapter of Maimon's Essay that concerns alteration argues that continuity is an a priori element that is added to the relations we perceive. Action and reaction are indivisible for Maimon but he does not take this to be given in foundational perception (as Jacobi did) but takes it instead to be the end-result of analysis. Jacobi cannot allow for lawful regularity but Maimon, by contrast, is very concerned to address this. Measurability, for Maimon, is a feature of perception itself.
Real objects cannot be constructed and the result of this is that finite understanding has to relate to these as being "noumenon" (a very odd result for Kant!). The infinite understanding cannot construct real objects either but it does not need to since it grasps the continuity between them as a unity. Construction is neither miraculous nor is it an act of the will. God is, for Maimon, the limit-concept of human understanding's attempt to measure the world. Change cannot be seen by us otherwise than as continuous, we could not believe in any other type of change and nor could God construct any other form of change. There can be nothing but facts in the world for Maimon: there is no further side to the world.
Paul Franks gave the second paper and took his title from the dedication to Kant that Maimon put at the front of the essay where he compared himself to a swallow and Kant to a swan. Franks began his response to the Essay from its introduction and pointed out that Maimon does not there include physics in the province of his notion of "science" due to the fact that his basic conception of science does not come from physical investigation but rahter from mathematics. Citing the two slightly different characterisations of the transcendental Kant gives in the Critique of Pure Reason from A12 and B25 Franks pointed out that Kant does not here deal with "objects in general". Maimon, by contrast, seeks to indicate the need to return to the forms of objects in general in his wider conception of ontology.
Franks went on to speak about the split within analytic readings of Kant between Aristotelian and Platonic conceptions of the Critical task. "Aristotelians" such as Strawson and McDowell emphasise the comprehension of the immediate givenness of objects whereas Platonists such as Michael Friedman, by contrast, are concerned with the mathematisation of nature. Franks firmly put Maimon on the Platonic side of this division.
Franks suggested that Maimon based his view of Kantian method on the Prolegomena rather than the Critique and even argued that Maimon's conception of the transcendental deduction is arrived at by means of this view. Franks stressed a conception that he took to be at the heart of Kant's own enquiry and that he termed epistemic content preservation. This view takes us to have the sciences and then seeks to comprehend experience in such a way that the possibility of us having the sciences can be preserved. This view leads Franks, like Strawson, to see Kant's Critical philosophy as a form of descriptive metaphysics. By way of reply, Maimon takes Hume's method of asking for the source of human convictions and suggesting that even if they are fictions that as such they may well work perfectly well.
Reverting to the contemporary split in readings of Kant, Franks pointed out that the Strawsonian view of intuition seemed to depend essentially on the connection between difference and likeness (concepts of reflection). This argument does not capture a lot of the specificity of space, such as its' 3-dimensionality although Kant had hoped to do this.
Franks understands Maimon's criticism of Kantian intuition as mistaken due to the fact that Maimon views Kantian intuitions as particulars. By contrast, intuitions are not particulars for Kant, they are rather singular actualities. Particulars are given instead by a combination of concepts and intuitions describing objects. Kantian intuition is a "state" says Franks and not an "episode". Space and time in the purest sense are pure self-affections.
For Kant finitude is revealed through thinking and its difference from intuition. The principle of unidirectionality of time for example is central to the understanding of the mathematisation of nature and to the operation of the finite intellect. It makes no sense, for Kant, to measure time against the infinite intellect. Our finitude is essential to our ability to cognise anything.
Maimon rejects the notion of regressive transcendental arguments, a notion that has recently become a very popular way of reading Kant (by Strawson, for example). Some account of concept formation has to be provided for Kant to respond to Maimon's challenges concerning the formation of a relationship to real objects. Kant, on Franks' view, discusses one in the Critique of Judgment. However, what the effect of reading it should be is to alter the structure of Kant's argument in the transcendental deduction so that the concepts of reflection are used as the centre of its argument. Intriguingly, this suggestion of Franks mirrors one I argued for in Chapter 4 of Kant's Transcendental Imagination.
However, what Franks seems to mean by this, is that aesthetic judgments show how concept formation is possible as they are never finished being constructed. Further, the sense contents that are insufficiently theorised in the Critique of Pure Reason are returned to in a richer way in the Critique of Judgment. Kant's position in the fullest sense amounts to a combination of empirical realism with regard to physics + empirical realism with regard to sense-perception on Franks view, a combination that contemporary Kantians have found it difficult to maintain. Maimon, by contrast, on Franks view, has a conception of empirical intuition that moves in the direction of axiomatic mathematics.
In discussion of Franks' paper, Nick Midgley argued that we don't start from everyday experience for Maimon, we begin from the ideas of the understanding, that is, from the differentials. What is mathematised may not be "nature" in the sense we experience everyday. This leaves open a potential gap between the two senses of "nature" that opens up room for scepticism.
Also in reply to Franks' paper, Gideon Freudenthal argued that Maimon takes physics to be contingently true rather than necessarily true and that he rejects necessitarian conceptions of law.
Daniela Voss gave the next paper which focused on the relationship of Deleuze to Maimon. Deleuze praised Maimon for rejecting "conditioning" as the point of view for transcendental philosophy. Deleuze claims that Kant's conditions are not able to ground the reality of our experience as conditions get their ground from experience so focusing on them mires the transcendental within the given.
Differentials are neither fictions nor realities on Deleuze's conception but elements of the unconscious. Every conscious perception is constituted through an original differentiated production within the understanding. Conscious perception must be resolved into its elements and these elements are the differentials of the rational manifold.
The differentials of objects are noumena but are immanent to the understanding. Voss suggested that the differentials are real and constitutive elements within an infinite understanding. Differentials are presentations: they do not represent anything and they cannot be represented. Deleuze resolves the infinite understanding into the presence of the unconscious in finite understanding. The unconscious thus becomes the condition of consciousness. This enables an internal genesis of consciousness to be disclosed.
Maimon did not view the differentials in terms of Leibniz's petites perceptiones as the latter struck him as merely a legacy of anthropology. However, Maimon does occasionally refer to differentials of sensation. Deleuze, by contrast to Maimon, reinscribes the differentials into the Leibnizian notion. Minute perceptions are distinct but obscure for Deleuze. By contrast, conscious perceptions are clear but confused.
The differential unconscious is in continuity with consciousness and Deleuze takes advantage of later developments of the calculus than were available to Maimon. Differentials are virtual elements of a differential unconscious, an unconscious that is present in finite thought.
Beth Lord's contribution focused on the relationship between Kant and Maimon. In April 1789 Maimon sent the manuscript of the Essay to Kant and Kant later arranged for a copy of the Critique of Judgment to be sent to Maimon. However, Kant subsequently failed to reply to Maimon's letters and never again referred to him seriously. Lord suggested, however, that the composition of the Critique of Teleological Judgment was seriously influenced by Kant's reading of Maimon's Essay.
The question that both the Essay and the Critique of Judgment concern themselves with is how to account for nature's infinite differences. The answer, in both texts, involves reference to the intuitive intellect. From this it follows that sections 76-77 of the Critique of Judgment, the sections most important for the German Idealists, were written, on Lord's view as a critique of Maimon. The teleological principle is something Kant takes to be required if we are not to be overwhelmed by diversity.
How do objects in general relate to objects in their genesis? Real objects in terms of their specific genesis and diversity are not, on Maimon's view, accounted for by Kant. Kant points out, in the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, that there might be such specific laws at work that we cannot determine them.
The genesis of objects occurs through thought for Maimon as our own understanding is a confused mode of the infinite intellect. In the case of the real object, ideas of understanding flow from differentials. Real objects are determined internally and genetically by specific differences. Real objects of thought are represented by imagination in sensibility.
Kant's intuitive intellect involves a distinction between the supersensible substratum and the intellect that causes it to be so that the understanding is thus external to the substratum. Kant takes Spinozism to consist in a conflation of the understanding with substance which is why he views Maimon as a Spinozist.
How to account for differences? Maimon does so through a rationalistic account of the intellect whilst Kant denies this due to it requiring a conflation of substance and understanding. However, Lord concluded the paper by suggesting that the distinction between Kant and Maimon would become less stark as Kant wrote the Opus Postumum where we encounter conceptions like Maimon's ideas of the understanding and a genetic discussion of the conditions of experience is supplied.
Gideon Freudenthal closed the conference with a paper that reflected on Maimon's conception of philosophy. When Maimon translated the Essay into Hebrew he termed it a work on universal philosophy which Freudenthal understood to mean that Maimon viewed the term "transcendental" in a medieval sense.
On Maimon's conception, knowledge worthy of the name is of the pure intellect. Maimon viewed geometry as a science of continuous magnitude and arithmetic as a science of discrete magnitude. Our cognition stands in the same relation to mathematics as the infinite intellect does to objects generally. We could forsake intuition if we were able to act like God.
Real objects are not, for Maimon, existent prior to relations since the relations are the objects themselves. Number is a ratio of each number to one so number is not a magnitude. It is only in relation to a specific intuition that number can determine magnitude. The common property of the numbers is their ratio to 1.
We cannot, however, construct the objects between which the ratios pertain and for this reason we require intuition. Mathematical truths are necessary but opaque to reason.However, Maimon upholds a criteria of rationality and measures mathematics against it. If his accounts fail to produce the reduction of mathematics to an entirely axiomatic system this need not affect his criteria and contemporary mathematics works with this criteria rather than with Kant's allegiance to the "fact" of how mathematics works.
P.S. Since writing this posting Gideon Freudenthal has been in touch with a much fuller account of his paper's argument which I have reproduced here.
On beginning to read Maimon's Essay on Transcendental Philosophy the first question that arises concerns his treatment of "intuition", a treatment I think deserves extended contrast with the views of Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell. Before going to the contrast, let's look first at some of the ways the first chapter of Maimon's Essay describes intuition. For the sake of today's posting I want to stick with the first chapter and not presuppose what is to come later.
Maimon's first point with regard to space and time fits with the argument of Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic. He opens by stating that space and time are not concepts abstracted from experience as they are not parts of concepts of experience but rather the unities through which the manifold "of experiential concepts" is gathered together. Whilst Maimon's manner of putting this is slightly different from Kant's it does not appear, at this point, significant in its difference since the argument appears to repeat the first argument of Kant's metaphysical exposition of the concepts of space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic: A23/B37 and A30/B46.
Maimon also goes on to link this first point with a second which again echoes the argument of the Aesthetic. This second point is that the parts of space and time are not possible prior to the wholes of space and time, the parts are hence "in" space and time. This seems to conflate the 3rd and 4th of the second edition arguments from the metaphysical exposition (A24-5/B39-40 and A31-2/B47-8). This conflation erases the distinction between two separate arguments Kant gave for thinking of space and time as intuitions rather than concepts. Sticking with space, as is customary, Kant first gave the argument that space is not what he calls here a "general concept of relations of things in general" by claiming that the whole of space is prior to the representation of its parts. Subsequently he gave the separate argument that space is represented as an infinite given magnitude due to the fact that the parts are all contained within it, rather than, as with concepts, being instead thought "under" it. The distinction between the arguments is of some interest since the first was intended not merely to show that space should be seen intuitively rather than conceptually but also that the kind of concept it is not is one that describes relations of things in general. The second argument, by contrast, indicates the reason why the contrast of the first argument enables not merely a reference to the kind of whole that space is but also why this kind of whole is generically distinct from that given to concepts. So why does Maimon effectively conflate these two arguments?
The answer seems to be that Maimon wishes to point in a different direction to Kant when he lists these considerations of the way to view space and time. After mentioning these arguments Maimon immediately adds that he agrees with the Kantian claim that space and time are forms of our sensibility but then adds that they are grounded in the universal forms of our thought in general. In making this claim Maimon mentions that the condition of our thought is "unity in the manifold" and seems to be connecting the claim about space and time to the argument Kant will offer in the Transcendental Deduction concerning the transcendental unity of apperception. A reason for thinking that this connection is what Maimon has in mind can be found at A105 where Kant writes:
we think a triangle as an object, in that we are conscious of the combination of three straight lines according to a rule by which such an intuition can always be represented. This unity of rule determines all the manifold, and limits it to conditions which make unity of apperception possible. The concept of this unity is the representation of the object = x, which I think through the predicates, above mentioned, of a triangle.
As will become clear in subsequent postings, Maimon has a lot to say about the triangle, and, indeed, about geometry, a subject that will have to wait for another day (or, rather, many days!). The point is, however, that in referring to this view here, Maimon seems not to allow for an independent discussion of a priori intuition that Kant aims to carry out in the Aesthetic.
Maimon next goes on to mention the characteristic ways of understanding space and time, stating that space is the "being-apart" of objects (as follows from his first characterisation of space from the externality argument of the Aesthetic) whilst time is the preceding and succeeding of objects with respect to one another. It follows from this view of time that Maimon does not regard simultaneity as a determination of time, something that would at least cut against one reading of the 3rd Analogy, suggesting it needs to be read in terms of co-existence rather than simultaneity. However, more interestingly, Maimon is explicit in pointing out that space and time are conditions of each other in terms of representations, something Kant does indeed indicate but not always as explicitly as Maimon formulates it.
The next problem addressed concerns the view that space and time are conceptual as well as intuitive and it is here that Maimon's reflections relate to those of Sellars and McDowell. The claim that space and time are, in some sense, conceptual in addition to being intuitive is often thought (by Henry Allison, for example) to underly the distinction Kant makes between "forms of intuition" and "formal intuition" at B160. For reasons that would take too long to summarise in this posting I think this is a false view of the distinction Kant is drawing at B160 but that Allison thinks it plausible is sufficient to show that within contemporary Kant scholarship there is serious consideration given to the view that space and time are, in at least some sense, conceptual. Further, the argument, on-going since Kemp Smith's commentary on the Critique was first published, to the effect that the view of the Transcendental Analytic is not entirely of a piece with that of the Transcendental Aesthetic, further points in the direction of these types of considerations.
Maimon's way of articulating the view that space is a concept does not rely, at least in chapter 1 of the Essay, on either the considerations at work for Allison or those at work for Kemp Smith. Rather, Maimon simply goes back to the claim that conceptuality involves unity in the manifold and indicates that such manifold unity is also at work in the "concept" of space. The intuition of space is traced by Maimon back to the work of the imagination. In one sense, there is an obvious move here since intuition and imagination are closely connected for Kant. However, whereas the transcendental synthesis of imagination is, for Kant, the general basis of the possibility of experience (when combined with the transcendental unity of apperception), for Maimon, by contrast, to say that intuition and imagination are connected is to say there is something problematic in the intuitive sense of space. The intuitive sense of space is understood by Maimon as arising when something relative (such as place or movement) is taken to be absolute so the intuitive sense of space is an "imaginative" sense of it.
However, whilst this intuitive sense of space is therefore, in some sense inferior to the conceptual sense of space there is an important element of this intuitive sense of space that has to be conserved. This is that it is from the intuitive sense of space, according to Maimon, that "the objects of mathematics" arise. This claim introduces a further problem in Maimon's account since the possibility of the production of these "objects of mathematics" indicates a distinction within imagination itself as he makes clear:
The validity of the principles [Grundsatze] of these fictions is based only on the possibility of their production. For example, 'a triangle arises from three lines, of which two together are longer than the third'', or 'a figure cannot arise from two lines', and the like. In this case even the imagination (as the faculty of fictions, for determining objects a priori) serves the understanding. As soon as the understanding prescribes the rules for drawing a line between two points (that is, that it should be the shortest), the imagination draws a straight line to satisfy this demand. This faculty of fictions [Erdictungsvermogen] is, as it were, something intermediate between the imagination properly so-called and the understanding....
Here we find that the imagination that is "properly so called" is apparently distinct from the "faculty of fictions" as the latter is rather placed between imagination and understanding. The understanding itself is conceived here in orthodox Kantian fashion as the faculty of rules and is understood as active whilst the imagination is presented as partly passive and partly active. The passivity of imagination is the guidance of it by association (empirical or Humean imagination) whilst the activity of imagination involves the capacity to order. This active/passive combination is what is at work for "imagination proper" whilst the faculty of fictions is distinct from this as it is "completely spontaneous" (like understanding).
At this point things get further complicated. Maimon now presents his account of synthesis and describes three different forms of it. In one respect, again, this is orthodox since Kant did this also in the A-Deduction and section 26 of the B-Deduction still includes some sense of this. However, whereas Kant distinguishes between the syntheses of apprehension, reproduction and recognition, Maimon distinguishes rather between necessary synthesis, arbitrary synthesis and spontaneous synthesis. Necessary synthesis involves the unity and the manifold being, says Maimon, "given to the understanding, but not produced by it". This type of synthesis is at work, Maimon claims, when the real in sensation is given to us. This real is not produced by the understanding as it is sensible and it is necessary since sensation can be given no other way but understanding does not produce it. This is a suggestive response to the Anticipations of Perception.
The arbitrary synthesis, by contrast, is said to be produced by the understanding (hence not like the first synthesis just given to the understanding). However, whilst the understanding is the basis of this synthesis, this does not entail for Maimon that we have here an objective law. What does this synthesis connect to? Time and space as intuitively given and hence also the "objects of mathematics". As the first appeared to relate to the Anticipations of Perception so here there appears to be an echo of the Axioms of Intuition. Certainly the general claim that mathematics involves arbitrary production has a long ancestry in Kant's thought and I treated it at length in Chapter 6 of Kant's Transcendental Imagination. Maimon gives a lapidary presentation of his general claim here:
A determined (limited) space can be arbitrarily taken as a unit [Einheit] so that an arbitrary plurality [Vielheit] emerges out of it through the successive synthesis of such units with each other (this plurality is arbitrary as much in relation to the unity that is adopted, as with respect to the ever possible continuation of this synthesis).
However, whilst this again appears orthodox enough the way Maimon turns it shows an important twist since he goes on to claim that time and space as concepts contain "as differentials of the plurality, a necessary unity in the manifold" whereas Kant makes no reference to this conception, at least, not in this way.
Maimon also adds that the distinction between treating time and space as concepts and treating them as intuitions is important for thinking about the relation of time and space to each other. Considered just as concepts time and space are exclusive of each other whereas considered as intuitions they are not. The reason why time and space are not exclusive of each other when treated intuitively is then said to be that, as so treated, they are both extensive magnitudes, a claim that takes us straight to the Axioms of Intuition, just as I already claimed.
Finally, the spontaneous synthesis is a production of understanding from an objective ground but Maimon says no more about this in the first chapter. Rather, the discussion of the second synthesis steals the stage and from it Maimon appears to derive the surprising consequence that space and time, considered as "predicates" of intuition are only empirical and not pure though what effect this has on transcendental philosophy is not so obvious from the first chapter alone.
The considerations of this chapter are already very rich and I suggested, in opening, some connections to Sellars and McDowell but suspect I will have to leave the development of these to a further posting given the length this one has already run to. I will also treat later some considerations concerning how the views presented here relate to my previous account of Kant's view of intuition as developed in my book on imagination.
Salomon Maimon's work Essay on Transcendental Philosophy has recently been translated into English. The translators include my colleague, Henry Somers Hall and Nick Midgley. There will be a conference to celebrate the translation of this work into English held at Manchester Metropolitan on August 19th and there has been an on-going reading group focused on the work over at Perverse Egalitarianism. I will post a response to the papers of the conference after it has taken place and also intend to lay out some responses here to parts of the work. Maimon was one of the few critics that Kant, in his life-time, suggested was of some importance although it is also true that Kant did not engage Maimon very deeply, not least because he was convinced that the most important task was the elaboration of his own philosophy rather than responding to critics of it. Maimon is also something of a link to the German Idealist tradition that develops in the wake of Kant. Whilst Maimon's response to Kant is focused in the Essay more on theoretical than practical philosophy the implications of some of his challenges to Kant are of wider interest than might be thought, not least in connection with recent analytic responses to Kant from the likes of John McDowell and Wilfrid Sellars so expect more substantive theoretical postings to follow in due course.
