Salomon Maimon

This is the entertaining first-person account of an 18th-century Lithuanian Jew who married a Polish woman, decided that Poland was hopelessly backward and superstitious, and then decided to relocate to Berlin and become an Enlightenment philosopher -- which he did!

His ill-starred trip to Germany reduced him to total vagabond poverty, but once there he managed to strike up acquaintances with rabbis who recognized his brilliant Talmudic mind and helped get him on his feet. He then worked on and off as a tutor while studying Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Wolff, Leibniz, Mendelssohn, and Kant, and then developing his own theories of transcendental philosophy.

After publishing a comprehensive treatise, he convinced a scholarly friend to send it to Kant himself. When Kant finally read it, in 1790, he proclaimed Maimon one of the very few scholars able to understand his work. Unfortunately, Maimon's enjoyment of this stellar validation was brief: within five years he had died, succumbing "apparently to alcoholism."

Note five middle chapters are devoted to summarizing and explicating 12th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonedes (from whom Maimon took his name) The Guide For The Perplexed. This turgid collection of technical chapters is perhaps better skipped over, as Maimon only gets around to suggesting in a later chapter!… (meer)