This essay develops a new interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn’s ontological argument in the
. At the beginning, Immanuel Kant’s famous criticism of the ontological proof of God’s existence in the
is ...presented. Then I offer an in-depth analysis of Mendelssohn’s original ontological argument in the
. It is shown that with Mendelssohn’s new proof of God, Kant’s objections are answered. Finally, it is explained why Mendelssohn does not succeed in completely refuting Kant’s objections.
Abstract
In his Jerusalem, Moses Mendelssohn describes a Polynesian visitor to Dessau before traveling to India by way of ancient Jerusalem. In two pages, Mendelssohn has crossed the world, doing so ...to argue that in spite of their cultural differences, most human beings ultimately share basic salvific religious truths. This paper explores the religious universalism reflected in this striking passage, analyzes Mendelssohn's cultural sensitivity and pluralism, and offers a characterization of the particularities of Mendelssohn's Jewish universalism as well as concluding thoughts on the varieties of universalism more generally.
Complex aesthetic perception, according to Mendelssohn’s writings between 1755 and 1771, is most alluring if it showcases a
in the order of perfection. With this, Mendelssohn introduces a shift in ...our understanding of the artistic act of imitation: Artistic semblance is always lacking, and a painting that
is, in fact, displeasing. This is also the main reason why we enjoy non-beautiful art: in the artistic rendering of an unpleasant ‘object’ we focus on the artistic act itself, on its formal features, and its effects on us as the perceiver. Thus, a representation that evokes the mixed feelings of pleasure, appreciation, and rejection is superior to ‘pure’ beauty, in that it better refers us to higher forms of perfection: the perfection of the perceiving and creative subject (hence, including both artist and audience). It is the nagging, near-painful impression of mixed sentiments that, according to Mendelssohn, guides our self-perfection, the highest aim of all human endeavors.
Abstract
There is widespread agreement in scholarship that Moses Mendelssohn lacked historical thinking, an opinion accepted even among Mendelssohn experts. This misjudgment is based on a remark in ...his
Jerusalem
against Lessing’s
Education of Humankind
and surely ignores Mendelssohn’s historical work. I will question the misjudgment by a detour: first, I will ask for whom Lessing wrote his
Education of Humankind
. Then I will turn to the usually celebrated origin of historical thinking in Semler and Herder and question the historicity of their views. It is only in the 3rd section that I will focus directly on Mendelssohn’s historical work and his truly historical understanding of religion, in agreement with Lessing.
Recent scholarship on modern Jewish thought has sought to overcome the field’s Germanocentrism by recovering diverse visions of Jewish life across eastern and western Europe. While studies typically ...emphasize either striking differences or surprising affinities between these settings, I use the neglected eastern European philosopher Nachman Krochmal to highlight a strategy of creative appropriation and redirection—an eastern European strategy of breaking with German-Jewish philosophy precisely by deploying that tradition’s own resources. One of modern Jewish philosophy’s early episodes, I argue, is a politically charged engagement with biblical exegesis involving Krochmal and the German-Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn. Implicitly drawing on yet revising the treatment of biblical interpretation in Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings, Krochmal seeks to retrieve what he sees as a vital element of Jewish politics: possessing neither a shared land nor military strength, he insists, Jews have long sustained their diasporic collective through hermeneutical endeavors such as rabbinic midrash, and they should continue to do so by launching a transnational project of historically sensitive exegesis. The resulting image of a transnational Jewish collective whose fate is separate from that of non-Jewish polities breaks with Mendelssohn’s political vision, pointing to an east-west dynamic of creative repurposing—an instance of an eastern European thinker drawing on a German-Jewish predecessor to develop a sharply contrasting philosophical vision.
Abstract
Isaac ben Moshe Halevi (Isaac Satanow, 1732-1804) serves as an interesting example of how Jewish intellectuals offered alternative ways of entering the new era. Unlike other authors, Satanow ...does not explicitly concentrate on secularization or assimilation in his writing, but instead intends to revive traditional values and writing by putting them into a new cultural and intellectual framework. Satanow combines relevant topics from Jewish tradition with scientific discoveries, philosophical reasoning, and kabbalistic thought. An analysis of Satanow's unique combination of literary and intellectual corpora from various periods and backgrounds offers a more nuanced picture of European Jewish intellectual history and challenges the grand narratives of scholarship. Furthermore, an awareness of the deep impact of German philosophy and natural science on Satanow's thought provides insight into his relationship with the majority culture and his Eastern European background and also shows how his concept of modernity seeped in via complex networks.
In his
, a mere four years after the publication of the first edition of the
, Moses Mendelssohn provided an accurate and complete refutation of Kant’s criticism of the ontological argument. In this ...paper, I expound the way in which both Kant and Mendelssohn conceive of the ontological proof. Later, I analyse Mendelssohn’s discussion of the three possible forms in which Kant’s main objection to the argument can be presented, as identified by Mendelssohn himself. I conclude that Mendelssohn’s defence of the ontological proof, far from being an attempt to reduce the question to a mere verbal dispute, seems to succeed in drastically limiting the value and scope of Kant’s criticism of speculative theology.
Two foremost spokesmen for the German Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant, continued the defence of the separation of church and state that was at the heart of the Enlightenment in ...general and advocated by such great predecessors as Roger Williams and John Locke and contemporaries such as James Madison. The difference between Mendelssohn and Kant on which I focus here is that while Mendelssohn argues against his critics that Judaism is the appropriate religion for a specific people without being appropriate for all, thus implying more generally that different religions are appropriate for groups with different histories, Kant argues first that Judaism is not a genuine religion at all, second that Christianity provides the most suitable symbols or aesthetic representations of the core truths of the religion of reason, and finally that in any case all historical religion will ultimately fade away in favour of the pure religion of reason. Kant’s assumptions are tendentious and his conclusion implausible; Mendelssohn’s view that religion and differences of religion are here to stay provides a far stronger basis for genuine toleration and a strict separation of church and state.
Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise introduced the unique catchphrase of the theological-political. While commanding popular currency, the full implications of the phrase is rarely considered in ...terms of modern Jewish thought. This paper examines how paying close attention to the hyphen helps us better understand the critical role of the hyphen in Spinoza and its significance for Mendelssohn, Heine, and Derrida’s critical agenda of rethinking the theological-political.
Moses Mendelssohn, arguably the founding figure of modern Jewish philosophy, famously quipped that it was the hours of his youth spent studying the philosophical work of another Moses—Moses ...Maimonides—that left him with his famously crooked posture. This study investigates one important aspect of the relationship between Mendelssohn and Maimonides: their respective attitudes toward anthropomorphic language in the Bible. Much of the first part of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed is devoted to reinterpretation of scriptural language in light of Maimonides’s non-anthropomorphic, incorporeal conception of God. These chapters constitute a central plank of Maimonides’s religious agenda. Like Maimonides, Mendelssohn was both a philosopher and a religious Jew. His most extensive project intended for a Jewish audience was his German translation of the Pentateuch, accompanied by a Hebrew commentary, known as the Bi’ur. This study examines the manner in which Mendelssohn saw fit to interpret precisely the same set of biblical terms selected by Maimonides for philosophical reinterpretation. Through an investigation of Mendelssohn’s approach to anthropomorphism, divine incorporeality, and philosophical reinterpretation in the biblical commentary, I hope to shed light on an important dimension of the nature of his engagement with Maimonides.
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