Abstract

The article provides a historic-philosophical reconstruction of the ethical views of S. Maimon – Belarusian-born philosopher that played a major role in the history of German Classical Philosophy. It examines the central idea of Maimon’s theoretical philosophy that consists in the necessity of transformation of Kant’s transcendental idealism in the coherently monistic direction, which is achieved on the basis of the concept of the infinite understanding postulated by the thinker. It reveals the connection between the thinker’s ethical theory and the theoretical part of his transcendental philosophy. It analyzes Maimon’s distinguishing of the concepts of drive, desire and will. The article identifies the main typological feature of Maimon’s ethics – its intellectualism that consists in the maximal convergence of cognition and morals, of the true and the good. It reconstructs Maimon’s grounding of the existence in us of the foundational to the morals higher faculty of desire through its rooting in the existence of our drive to cognition. It conducts the comparative analysis of the ethics of Maimon and Kant and finds out that in spite of all the theoretical dependence of Maimon’s ethics on Kant’s one, their underlying tendencies are direct opposites of each other. It provides the evaluation of the historic-philosophical importance of Maimon’s ethical theory.