Salomon Maimon

Salomon Maimon (about 1753 to 1800) was a philosopher born to a Lithuanian Jewish family in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in what is now Belarus, who wrote in German and in Hebrew. A prodigy in Talmudic studies, he was married at eleven, became interested in Kabbalah and the Hasidic court of the Maggid of Mezritch, and after a second attempt settled in Berlin in 1780, where he joined Moses Mendelssohn and the circles of the Haskalah. He studied philosophy along the lines of Leibniz, Wolff and Mendelssohn, and after meeting Kantian philosophy in 1787 he published his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790). By his critical scepticism he took a position between Kant and Hume, and Kant is reported to have regarded him as one of his most astute critics.