Last Works
by Bruce Rosenstock /
2012 / English / PDF
4.6 MB Download
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 illustrious contemporaries. Last Works includes, for the first time complete and in a single volume, the English translation of two works, Morning Hours: Lectures on the Existence of God (1785) and To the Friends of Lessing (1786). Mendelssohn wrote these last two works to commemorate the death of his friend the dramatist Johann Gottfried 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, including the foundations of human knowledge, the basis of our moral and aesthetic powers of judgment, 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 Schwarmer, the religious fanatic who rejects reason in favour of belief in suprarational revelation. Bruce Rosenstock is an associate professor of religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His other books include New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile and Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond.
