<b>Franz, Timothy.</b> <i>Maimon’s Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking. A Translation and Commentary</i> . New York: Oxford University Press 2024, cxi + 281pp.

With this volume, Timothy Franz offers the first English translation of Maimon's Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking (1794) -hereafter Logic.The Logic marks a cornerstone of Maimon's philosophical project and is arguably his most significant contribution to early post-Kantian thought.Franz' volume includes not only the Logic itself, but also Maimon's Letters of Philalethes to Aenesidemus (1794), as well as his replies to critical reviews of two earlier works: On the Progress of Philosophy (1792) and Forays in the Realm of Philosophy (1793).These materials already formed part of the original German publication of the Logic.To further contextualize the work, the volume also offers translations of several letters from Maimon to Kant, Reinhold, and others.These letters shed light on his motivations, central arguments, and broader intellectual aims in composing the Logic.Together with Franz's extensive scholarly commentary and illuminating introduction, this edition provides an indispensable resource for readers seeking to engage with Maimon's thought.It opens access to a work that remains underexplored but is of great importance, both in its own right and for understanding thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.Why did Maimon feel compelled to write a new logic or -as he himself also puts it -"a new theory of thinking"?The answer, I think, also reveals his most important contribution to the development of German idealism.As is well-known, Maimon identified several flaws in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), many of which he sets out in his still most famous work, the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790).Yet his perhaps most detrimental criticism of Kant, which in my view creates the very desideratum for developing a new critical logic, has often been neglected: Maimon raises several objections to Kant's account of general logic and thereby implicitly challenges Kant's claim that logic is an established, self-sufficient science, "finished and completed" since Aristotle's time (Bviii).As Lu-Adler notes in her book on Kant's science of logic, Maimon first states this directly to Kant in a letter dated December 2, 1793: Since you convinced me, worthy man, that all our cognitions must be preceded by a critique of the faculty of cognition, I could not help but be vexed by the following observation: since the appearance of this critique, there have been several attempts to bring particular sciences into accord with its requirements, yet no one has made such an attempt with logic.I am convinced that logic, as a science, cannot evade the critique.General logic is of course to be distinguished from transcendental logic, but must be revised in light of the latter.(Br 11, 470-71; in Lu-Adler 2018, 161-162; my emphasis) Maimon argues that, by the lights of his own critical project, Kant ought to have subjected logic to the same treatment he applied to metaphysics: a critique.In the Preface to the Logic, at the beginning of his own "Derivation of the Categories," and again in the "Sixth Letter" to Aenesidemus, Maimon thus maintains that what Kant presents as general logic -meant to provide the "clue" for discovering the categories and their a priori origin -contains several serious "mistakes" and hence