{"product_id":"last-works-9780252036873","title":"Last Works","description":"\u003cp\u003eMoses Mendelssohn (17291786) 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 Mendelssohns last works is his friendship with Lessing. Mendelssohn hoped to show that he  a Torah-observant Jew  and Lessing  Germanys 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.  Lessings 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 Mendelssohns 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 Schwrmer  the religious fanatic who rejects reason in favor of belief in suprarational revelation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67904714702901,"sku":"ByrdShop_0252036875","price":72.23,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780252036873.jpg?v=1793850785","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/last-works-9780252036873","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}