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: 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: Philosophical Writings

Moses Mendelssohn: Philosophical Writings PDF Author: Moses Mendelssohn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521574778
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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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

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'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

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 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.

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.

Faith and Freedom

Faith and Freedom PDF Author: Michah Gottlieb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199838240
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The recent renewal of the faith-reason debate has focused attention on earlier episodes in its history. One of its memorable highlights occurred during the Enlightenment, with the outbreak of the "Pantheism Controversy" between the eighteenth century Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the Christian Counter-Enlightenment thinker Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. While Mendelssohn argued that reason confirmed belief in a providential God and in an immortal soul, Jacobi claimed that its consistent application led ineluctably to atheism and fatalism. At present, there are two leading interpretations of Moses Mendelssohn's thought. One casts him as a Jewish traditionalist who draws on German philosophy to support his premodern Jewish beliefs, while the other portrays him as a secret Deist who seeks to encourage his fellow Jews to integrate into German society and so disingenuously defends Judaism to avoid arousing their opposition. By exploring the Pantheism Controversy and Mendelssohn's relation to his two greatest Jewish philosophical predecessors, the medieval Rabbi Moses Maimonides and the seventeenth century heretic Baruch Spinoza, Michah Gottlieb presents a new reading of Mendelssohn arguing that he defends Jewish religious concepts sincerely, but gives them a humanistic interpretation appropriate to life in a free, diverse modern society. Gottlieb argues that the faith-reason debate is best understood not primarily as an argument about metaphysical questions, such as whether or not God exists, but rather as a contest between two competing conceptions of human dignity and freedom. Mendelssohn, Gottlieb contends, gives expression to a humanistic religious perspective worthy of renewed consideration today.

Morning Hours

Morning Hours PDF Author: Moses Mendelssohn
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400704186
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
The last work published by Moses Mendelssohn during his lifetime, Morning Hours (1785) is also the most sustained presentation of his mature epistemological and metaphysical views, all elaborated in the service of presenting proofs for the existence of God. But Morning Hours is much more than a theoretical treatise. It also plays a central role in the drama of the Pantheismusstreit, Mendelssohn's "dispute" with F. H. Jacobi over the nature and scope of Lessing's attitude toward Spinoza and "pantheism". As the latest salvo in a war of texts with Jacobi, Morning Hours is also Mendelssohn's attempt to set the record straight regarding his beloved Lessing in this connection, not least by demonstrating the absence of any practical (i.e., religious or moral) difference between theism and a "purified pantheism".