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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: Salomon Maimon on possibility and actuality: is a right measure for things in the world achievable? According to the traditional scholastic metaphysics and to the Kantian theory also, all things that are not self-contradictory are possible. From the sphere of what is possible, some things are actual. So all things that are actual must be possible too. Maimon was the philosopher who claimed that not all things that are actual are possible aswell. This claim needs argumentation. Maimon draws up an own system of transcendental logic where the main role is played by what he calls the “principle of determinability”. The aim of this principle is to produce “real” thinking. This is a thinking in which all elements are connected by way of the following rule: in a synthesis of two elements, the element that can be conceived both as in relation to the other, but also by itself, is the subject (the substance). The other element, which can be conceived only as being in a relation with the other element but never independently of it, by itself, is the predicate (accident). In the continuous chain of determination, each element is successively subject and predicate. This principle is the basis for understanding the rules of generation of objects in the world; the chain of determination is being thought by an infinite intellect, for whom thinking and existence coincide. We are endowed only with a finite intellect, although ours is identical in nature with the infinite one. Our task in the world is to seek out and understand the connections between things as the infinite intellect conceived them. Due to our finite power of thinking and to the intervention of the imagination, we see things in a distorted manner, that is, arbitrarily. Unless we understand the correct chain of determination, all our empirical syntheses in the world are purely contingent ones. Only by understanding the generation rule of the empirical objects we can understand their possibility. The concept of this article is to show the fact that actually Maimon, due to the above mentioned particularity of his thinking, believes there must be a “right” way of conceiving things in the world, and we must look for this right way, that is, for the right measure of things. If that were true, one could say that Maimon’s philosophy, although idealistic in its claims, is in fact a realistic one in its consequences. Keywords: Salomon Maimon, transcendental idealism, possibility, actuality, monism
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