Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn

by Strauss, Leo; Yaffe, Martin D.

• ISBN13: 9780226922782
• ISBN10: 0226922782
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-12-11
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Moses Mendelssohn (172986) 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 Mendelssohnis 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.

Table of Contents

Translator's Preface	p. xi
Chronology of Writings Mentioned in Strauss's Introductions	p. xxi
Abbreviations	p. xxvii
Leo Strauss's Introductions to Ten Writings of Moses Mendelssohn
Preliminary Remark	p. 3
Introduction to Pope a Metaphysician!	p. 7
Introduction to "Epistle to Mr. Lessing in Leipzig"	p. 14
Introduction to Commentary on Moses Maimonides' "Logical Terms"	p. 18
Introduction to Treatise on Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences	p. 19
Introduction to Phädon	p. 29
Introduction to Treatise on the Incorporeality of the Human Soul	p. 50
Introduction to "On a Handwritten Essay of Mr. de Luc's"	p. 55
Introduction to The Soul	p. 57
Introduction to Morning Hours and To the Friends of Lessing	p. 59
Introduction to God's Cause, or Providence Vindicated	p. 146
Strauss, Preliminary Remark to A Reminder of Lessing	p. 162
Supplements to Translator's Notes in Strauss's Introductions	p. 163
From Mendelssohn's "Epistle to Mr. Lessing in Leipzig" (Passage cited in Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 275, n. 41)	p. 213
From Lessing's "The Education of the Human Race" (§§70-73)	p. 214
An Interpretive Essay
Strauss on Mendelssohn: An Interpretive Essay	p. 219
Index of Proper Names	p. 319
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