 Unlike Kant and most of the German Idealists, Maimon denies that practical reason enjoys a primacy over theoretical reason. For Maimon, the force of both morality and epistemology resides in the notion of universal validity: as rational beings we are bound by both philosophical truth and moral duty. As Maimon puts the matter, “the moral good is good only because it is true.” (GW II, 405 | VT 409) And, in the 1794 essay “Attempt at a New Presentation of the Principle of Morality and a New Deduction of its Reality,” Maimon radically alters Kant’s famous claim in the Groundwork about the good will being the only unconditioned good, instead holding that “it is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except the striving after cognition.” (GW VI, 407; translated in Quinn (2018)) As such, the theoretical and the practical go hand in hand; for Maimon, it makes no sense to follow Kant’s claim to have denied knowledge to make room for faith. Rather, Maimon revives something like the Aristotelian notion that the highest virtue and pleasure are found in philosophical contemplation. This results, Maimon claims, because both practical and theoretical cognition follow from the same notion of freedom: