In 1789 Salomon Maimon sent Kant, via Markus Herz, the manuscript of his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (Kant, 1999, pp. 291-294). A surprised Kant replied to Herz: “None of my critics understood me as well as Herr Maimon does” (Kant, 1999, pp. 311-315). Kant’s praise of Maimon makes him a singular figure in the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. But while the theoretical aspect of Maimon’s criticism of Kant has received increasing attention in recent years, its practical implications remain under-examined. In what follows, I use the notion of rational faith for the purposes of a tentative reconstruction of Maimon’s reading of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that brings together theoretical and practical aspects of the thought of both philosophers. Kant and Maimon shared a project of devising a form of faith that would express rational rather than religious-based morality. Kant argued for a rational moral freedom that is vouched by an infinite intellect that cannot be attributed to humans but more appropriately to God. For Maimon, the answers to the questions What can I know? and What should I do? involve a cognitive and affective process of striving to expand our finite consciousness. This process is the rational expression of God in us.
Because we do not have a unified account of the presence and absence of women in male or patriarchal canonical thought – if that is even possible or desirable – I refer to their presence and absence as the ways of women in canonical thought, hereafter “the ways of women”. We also do not know yet whether we as women are making different ways into canonical thought, whether we are creating a women’s canonical thought, or whether we could abandon the idea of canonical thought. Taking this uncertainty to heart, I consider what these possibilities have in common, namely, a demand for a freedom of canonical thought. By freedom of canonical thought, I understand a freedom to conform or not to canonical thinking. I consider some basic epistemological assumptions about such a freedom, and whether this may be a step toward a critique of the ways of women in thinking canons.
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