CfP: Salomon Maimon’s Mature Philosophy, Heidelberg University, 16-17 September 2024

Call for Abstracts: Salomon Maimon’s Mature Philosophy: Discovering New Perspectives after 1790

16-17 September 2024

Heidelberg University 

After being excluded from the philosophical canon for a long time, Salomon Maimon's philosophy has gained more attention in recent decades. Scholars have mainly focused on Maimon's role as 'Kant's best critic', as well as on his position as a rational dogmatist and empirical skeptic that he expressed in the context of his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790). As a result, Maimon is today relatively well-known as a Kantian skeptic and trailblazer for German idealism. 

Yet, Maimon never posed skeptical problems without attempting to answer them. In fact, his constructive and speculative efforts significantly outweigh his skeptical argumentation and extended over the last ten years of his life. His speculative efforts included, but are not limited to, a philosophy of the world-soul, his theory and method of fictions, a new foundation of transcendental and formal logic, as well as theories of ethics, right, language and aesthetics. Despite growing scholarly recognition, questions surrounding the presentation of Maimon’s own speculative thought remain relatively unexplored. 

Against the traditional reading that confines Maimon’s philosophy to the one system that he developed in his first book, this conference intends to study Maimon’s many significant later works on their own merits, and as successive stages in his unique approach to a mature philosophy. While contributions on any aspect of Maimon’s philosophy are welcomed, we particularly encourage submissions related to Maimon’s philosophical works after the Essay (1790), such as Forays into the Field of Philosophy (1793), Essay on a New Logic (1794), or the Critical Investigations on the Human Mind (1797). Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Maimon’s epistemology and metaphysics

• Maimon’s ethics and philosophy of rights

• Maimon’s logic and philosophy of science

• Maimon’s aesthetics and philosophy of language

• Maimon’s metaphilosophy

• Maimon’s Hebrew writings (before and after 1790)

The conference is scheduled for September 16-17, 2024 at  Universität Heidelberg. The conference is intended to be a productive meeting for scholars, both young and established, already invested in Maimon studies or newly interested, who are developing new understandings of Maimon’s philosophically important but still relatively unexplored texts. It will also celebrate recent fundamental results in Maimon’s studies, including the first volume of the new edition of Maimon’s complete works (Frommann-Holzboog: 2023) and the first English translation of his Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking (Oxford University Press: 2024).

We invite PhD candidates and researchers at an early or advanced stage of their careers to contribute by submitting an abstract. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words; they should include a title and a separate page with the author’s name, affiliation, and contact information. Please email abstracts to jelscha.schmid@uni-heidelberg.de before the end of April 30, 2024. Notifications will be returned by May 30, 2024. 

Keynotes are: Prof. Katharina Kraus, Prof. Yitzhak Melamed, Prof. Karin Nisenbaum, Prof. Julia Peters, Prof. Peter Thielke

Please contact jelscha.schmid@uni-heidelberg.de for any further questions. 

Best regards,

Caterina Marinelli (Hamburg University), Timothy Franz (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Jelscha Schmid (Heidelberg University)