Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn PDF Author: Shmuel Feiner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300167520
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an accessible and fascinating biography of Moses Mendelssohn, the seminal Jewish philosopher "A fascinating portrait of an important Enlightenment figure."—Library Journal The “German Socrates,” Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the most influential Jewish thinker of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Berlin celebrity and a major figure in the Enlightenment, revered by Immanuel Kant, Mendelssohn suffered the indignities common to Jews of his time while formulating the philosophical foundations of a modern Judaism suited for a new age. His most influential books included the groundbreaking Jerusalem and a translation of the Bible into German that paved the way for generations of Jews to master the language of the larger culture. Feiner’s book is the first that offers a full, human portrait of this fascinating man—uncommonly modest, acutely aware of his task as an intellectual pioneer, shrewd, traditionally Jewish, yet thoroughly conversant with the world around him—providing a vivid sense of Mendelssohn’s daily life as well as of his philosophical endeavors. Feiner, a leading scholar of Jewish intellectual history, examines Mendelssohn as father and husband, as a friend (Mendelssohn’s long-standing friendship with the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was seen as a model for Jews and non-Jews worldwide), as a tireless advocate for his people, and as an equally indefatigable spokesman for the paramount importance of intellectual independence.

Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn PDF Author: Shmuel Feiner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300167520
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an accessible and fascinating biography of Moses Mendelssohn, the seminal Jewish philosopher "A fascinating portrait of an important Enlightenment figure."—Library Journal The “German Socrates,” Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the most influential Jewish thinker of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Berlin celebrity and a major figure in the Enlightenment, revered by Immanuel Kant, Mendelssohn suffered the indignities common to Jews of his time while formulating the philosophical foundations of a modern Judaism suited for a new age. His most influential books included the groundbreaking Jerusalem and a translation of the Bible into German that paved the way for generations of Jews to master the language of the larger culture. Feiner’s book is the first that offers a full, human portrait of this fascinating man—uncommonly modest, acutely aware of his task as an intellectual pioneer, shrewd, traditionally Jewish, yet thoroughly conversant with the world around him—providing a vivid sense of Mendelssohn’s daily life as well as of his philosophical endeavors. Feiner, a leading scholar of Jewish intellectual history, examines Mendelssohn as father and husband, as a friend (Mendelssohn’s long-standing friendship with the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was seen as a model for Jews and non-Jews worldwide), as a tireless advocate for his people, and as an equally indefatigable spokesman for the paramount importance of intellectual independence.

Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment

Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment PDF Author: Allan Arkush
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791495264
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Moses Mendelssohn, the author of numerous works on natural theology and ethics, was also the first modern philosopher of Judaism. This book places Mendelssohn's thought within the context of the Leibnizian-Wolffian school, the writings of Kant and Lessing and other major figures of the Enlightenment, and within the age-old tradition of Jewish rationalism. More than any previous treatment of this subject, it questions the extent to which Mendelssohn truly succeeded in reconciling his allegiance to the philosophy of the Enlightenment with his adherence to Judaism.

Moses Mendelssohn: Philosophical Writings

Moses Mendelssohn: Philosophical Writings PDF Author: Moses Mendelssohn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521573832
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Mendelssohn's Philosophical Writings, helped propel its author to the forefront of the Berlin Enlightenment.

Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn PDF Author: Moses Mendelssohn
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1611682142
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
An English translation of key works, many never before translated, by Moses Mendelssohn, the founder of modern Jewish philosophy

Socrates and the Jews

Socrates and the Jews PDF Author: Miriam Leonard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226472477
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Taking on the question of how the glories of the classical world could be reconciled with the Bible, this book explains how Judaism played a vital role in defining modern philhellenism.

Moses Mendelssohn's Hebrew Writings

Moses Mendelssohn's Hebrew Writings PDF Author:
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030022902X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
The first annotated English translation of the Hebrew writings of the great eighteenth-century Berlin philosopher

Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn

Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn PDF Author: Leo Strauss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226922790
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) was the leading Jewish thinker of the German Enlightenment and the founder of modern Jewish philosophy. His writings, especially his attempt during the Pantheism Controversy to defend the philosophical legacies of Spinoza and Leibniz against F. H. Jacobi’s philosophy of faith, captured the attention of a young Leo Strauss and played a critical role in the development of his thought on one of the fundamental themes of his life’s work: the conflicting demands of reason and revelation. Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn is a superbly annotated translation of ten introductions written by Strauss to a multi-volume critical edition of Mendelssohn’s work. Commissioned in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, the project was suppressed and nearly destroyed during Nazi rule and was not revived until the 1960s. In addition to Strauss’s introductions, Martin D. Yaffe has translated Strauss’s editorial remarks on each of the passages he annotates in Mendelssohn’s texts and brings those together with the introductions themselves. Yaffe has also contributed an extensive interpretive essay that both analyzes the introductions on their own terms and discusses what Strauss writes elsewhere about the broader themes broached in his Mendelssohn studies. Strauss’s critique of Mendelssohn represents one of the largest bodies of work by the young Strauss on a single thinker to be made available in English. It illuminates not only a formerly obscure phase in the emergence of his thought but also a critical moment in the history of the German Enlightenment.

The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn

The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn PDF Author: Leah Hochman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317669975
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn examines the idea of ugliness through four angles: philosophical aesthetics, early anthropology, physiognomy and portraiture in the eighteenth-century. Highlighting a theory that describes the benefit of encountering ugly objects in art and nature, eighteenth-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn recasts ugliness as a positive force for moral education and social progress. According to his theory, ugly objects cause us to think more and thus exercise—and expand—our mental abilities. Known as ugly himself, he was nevertheless portrayed in portraits and in physiognomy as an image of wisdom, gentility, and tolerance. That seeming contradiction—an ugly object (Mendelssohn) made beautiful—illustrates his theory’s possibility: ugliness itself is a positive, even redeeming characteristic of great opportunity. Presenting a novel approach to eighteenth century aesthetics, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies, Philosophy and History.

Last Works

Last Works PDF Author: Moses Mendelssohn
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093992
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the central figure in the emancipation of European Jewry. His intellect, judgment, and tact won the admiration and friendship of contemporaries as illustrious as Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Immanuel Kant. His enormously influential Jerusalem (1783) made the case for religious tolerance, a cause he worked for all his life. Last Works includes, for the first time complete and in a single volume, the English translation of Morning Hours: Lectures on the Existence of God (1785) and To the Friends of Lessing (1786). Bruce Rosenstock has also provided an historical introduction and an extensive philosophical commentary to both texts. At the center of Mendelssohn's last works is his friendship with Lessing. Mendelssohn hoped to show that he, a Torah-observant Jew, and Lessing, Germany's leading dramatist, had forged a life-long friendship that held out the promise of a tolerant and enlightened culture in which religious strife would be a thing of the past. Lessing's death in 1781 was a severe blow to Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn wrote his last two works to commemorate Lessing and to carry on the work to which they had dedicated much of their lives. Morning Hours treats a range of major philosophical topics: the nature of truth, the foundations of human knowledge, the basis of our moral and aesthetic powers of judgment, the reality of the external world, and the grounds for a rational faith in a providential deity. It is also a key text for Mendelssohn's readings of Spinoza. In To the Friends of Lessing, Mendelssohn attempts to unmask the individual whom he believes to be the real enemy of the enlightened state: the Schwärmer, the religious fanatic who rejects reason in favor of belief in suprarational revelation.

Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn PDF Author: Alexander Altmann
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1909821187
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 910

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Book Description
Professor Altmann quotes widely from personal letters and other contemporary documents in this biographical study of one of the most celebrated figures of the German Enlightenment. A considerable amount of the primary source material is offered in English translation.