ABSTRACT
Maimon who was born in 1753, initially educated like a traditional Talmud student, his first foray into philosophy being through the work of twelfth-century philosopher Moses Maimonides, which introduced him to the philosophy of Aristotle. In 1787, Maimon came to Berlin with the explicit purpose of studying Kant's philosophy. Maimon's objections centered on Kant's "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories". Kant suggested the Copernican Revolution because it allowed him to begin with a new premise in his attempt to refute Humean skepticism, a skepticism that had raised questions about the veracity and efficacy of science. Maimon is linked with Kant not as a Jew objecting to anti-Semitism, but as a philosopher who raised what Kant considered to be the most insightful and substantive challenges to the purely epistemological work of the first Critique. In other words, his conclusions that the soul, freedom, and God are illusions of reason are not substantiated, and the challenge to traditional God-centered religions disappears.
