Presburger's essay on the completeness and decidability of arithmetic with integer addition but without multiplication is a milestone in the history of mathematical logic and formal metatheory. The proof is constructive, using Tarski-style quantifier elimination and a four-part recursive comprehension principle for axiomatic consequence characterization. Presburger's proof for the completeness of first order arithmetic with identity and addition but without multiplication, in light of the restrictive formal metatheorems of Gödel, Church, and Rosser, takes the foundations of arithmetic in mathematical logic (...) to the limits of completeness and decidability. (shrink)

Aus der vielsprachigen Korrespondenz des Aufklärers, Metaphysikers, Religionsphilosophen und Literaturwissenschaftlers Moses Mendelssohn liegen bisher 1038 Briefe im Druck vor. Der Band "Einsichten" bietet eine repräsentative Auswahl, die Mendelssohns wissenschaftliche Vielseitigkeit, geistige Produktivität und menschliche Größe beleuchtet. Sie zeigt den "Sokrates des 18. Jahrhunderts" als bedeutenden Denker seiner Epoche und Wegbereiter wesentlicher Erkenntnisse und Entwicklungen.

Die drei Dialoge des »Phädon« markieren einen Höhe- und Wendepunkt in der Geschichte der philosophischen Psychologie. Die wirkungsgeschichtliche Bedeutung des Hauptwerkes des »Klassikers der rationalen Psychologie« (Dilthey) reicht weit über einen neuen Beweis der Unsterblichkeit der Seele hinaus.

Morning Hours is the first English translation of Morgenstunden by Moses Mendelssohn, the foremost Jewish thinker of the German Enlightenment. Published six months before Mendelssohn's death on January 4, 1786, Morning Hours is the most sustained presentation of his mature epistemological and metaphysical views, all elaborated in the service of presenting his son with 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". In Morning Hours Mendelssohn attempts to set the record straight regarding his beloved Lessing in this connection, not least by demonstrating the absence of any practical difference between theism and a "purified pantheism". (shrink)

Mendelssohn's Philosophical Writings, published in 1761, bring the metaphysical tradition to bear on the topic of 'sentiments' (defined as knowledge or awareness by way of the senses). Mendelssohn offers a nuanced defence of Leibniz's theodicy and conception of freedom, an examination of the ethics of suicide, an account of the 'mixed sentiments' so central to the tragic genre, a hypothesis about weakness of will, an elaboration of the main principles and types of art, a definition of sublimity and (...) analysis of its basic forms, and, lastly, a brief tract on probability theory, aimed at rebutting Hume's scepticism. This volume also includes the essay 'On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences', selected in 1763 by the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences over all other submitted essays, including one by Kant, as the best answer to the question of whether metaphysical sciences are capable of the same sort and degree of evidence as mathematics. (shrink)

Om spørgsmålet: Hvad er oplysning? af Moses Mendelssohn oversat af Anders Hee Nørbjerg Poulsen.

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.

Vier Untersuchungsfelder sind besonders hervorzuheben, die sich auf folgende Fragen konzentrieren: Was ist der Grund des Vergnügens? Welche Rolle spielt dabei die Konstitution des Kunstwerks, und wer kann es erschaffen? Wo verläuft die Grenze ästhetischer Wertschätzung? Welchen Einfluß hat die noch junge Wissenschaft der Ästhetik auf die Erkenntnistheorie und Morallehre? Mit seiner Theorie der vermischten Empfindungen, die eine Differenzierung zwischen der Beschaffenheit des schönen oder häßlichen Objekts, der künstlerischen Produktion und der Wirkung des Kunstwerks auf den Betrachter zuläßt, versucht (...) class='Hi'>Mendelssohn, Antworten auf diese Fragen zu formulieren. Im Rückgriff auf die so erfaßbaren psychologischen Gesetzmäßigkeiten ästhetischer Wahrnehmung konzipiert er die Ästhetik als Integrationsmoment, das die verschiedenartigen und bisweilen gegenläufigen Bestrebungen, Gefühle und Erkenntnisse des Menschen zu einem harmonischen Ganzen vereinen kann.Die hier zusammengestellten Schriften umfassen die grundlegenden Texte zu Mendelssohns Ästhetik. (shrink)

Examining a series of modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European cultures as they pursued pure sound as a privileged presence, White Musical Mythologies pairs Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida to offer an ambitious intellectual history of the colonial roots of modernist musical thought. Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as (...) something immediate and immersive: from Satie's dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse's experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez's endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would "absorb" the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. Edmund Mendelssohn suggests that the Euro-American idea of "pure sound," and the twentieth-century quest to produce it, was premised on an assumed authority of "the West" over Europe's others. Intended for readers in philosophy, musicology, art theory, the history of modernism, sound studies, and postcolonial studies, this book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound. (shrink)

Der Band enthält bisher unveröffentlichtes, in 40 Fällen als verschollen geltendes Briefmaterial (1755 bis 1785) aus Beständen in Europa, den USA und Moskau. Darunter befinden sich u.a. Lessings frühester Bericht seiner später abgebrochenen Englandreise, Nicolais Werbung um Abbts Mitarbeit, Bittbriefe an Friedrich II., Wincklers Bemühung um interkonfessionelle Zusammenarbeit, die Schätzung der bedeutenden Hebraica-Sammlung des David Oppenheim, Briefe des Staatsministers von Carmer, des Lord Bishop von London und des Grafen Wilhelm zu Schaumburg-Lippe.

1. Schriften zur Metaphysik, Ethik sowie zur Religionsphilosophie.--2. Schriften zur Psychologie, Aesthetik sowie zur Apologetik des Judentums.

Abstract:This essay is composed of three parts, corresponding to three theses: (1) dualism is at once universal and particular (cultural); (2) the opposition between God the Father and Dao the Mother is the most apt rendering of the differences between Western and Chinese dualisms; (3) History may be understood as an ongoing patriarchal rationalization whose contours are determined by the particular "bent" of a given culture. By contrast with the temporal preconceptions of Western thought (Plato's Ideas and the Hebrew God (...) are both "eternal"), China's spatial bias—and both "bents" are at least partly determined by the respective writing systems—led it to conceive the body/soul duality as soul in the body, and so to give religious priority to "body technology" (as opposed to the salvation of souls), to ritual (as opposed to discourse), and to the feminine. Because of Platonic negativity with regard to the body and the feminine, in contrast with male/female complementarity in Judaism, our attempt to understand Chinese culture in terms that are familiar to us must begin with Biblical, and not Platonic, categories—whence comes the necessity of comparing God the Father and Dao the Mother. (shrink)

Contents \t\t\t\t\t \tTRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION \t\t1 \t \tNOTE ON THE TRANSLATION \t\t39 \t OBSERVATIONS ON THE FEELING OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME \t\t\t\t\t \tSECTION ONE: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Distinct Objects of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime \t\t45 \tSECTION TWO: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was the premier Jewish thinker of his day and one of the best-known figures of the German Enlightenment, earning the sobriquet 'the Socrates of Berlin'. He was thoroughly involved in the central issue of Enlightenment religious thinking: the inevitable conflict between reason and revelation in an age contending with individual rights and religious toleration. He did not aspire to a comprehensive philosophy of Judaism, since he thought human reason was limited, but he did see Judaism as (...) compatible with toleration and rights. David Sorkin offers a close study of Mendelssohn's complete writings, treating the German, and the often-neglected Hebrew writings, as a single corpus and arguing that Mendelssohn's two spheres of endeavour were entirely consistent. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:In Morning Hours (1785), Moses Mendelssohn presents a proof for the existence of God from the grounding of possibility. Although Mendelssohn claims that this proof is original, it has not received much attention in the secondary literature. In this paper, I analyze this proof and present its historical context. I show that although it resembles Leibniz's proof from eternal truths and Kant's precritical possibility proof, it has unique characteristics that can be regarded as responses to deficiencies Mendelssohn (...) identified in these earlier proofs. I argue that by analyzing the semantics of judgments about dispositions, Mendelssohn provides a novel explanation for the basic premise shared by these proofs, namely that possibility is grounded in actuality. Additionally, this analysis simplifies the inference to a unique infinite mind grounding all possibility. Thus, the proof is worth studying both for historical reasons and for its original account of modal concepts. (shrink)

This essay develops a new interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn’s ontological argument in the Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s Existence. At the beginning, Immanuel Kant’s famous criticism of the ontological proof of God’s existence in the Critique of Pure Reason is presented. Then I offer an in-depth analysis of Mendelssohn’s original ontological argument in the Morning Hours. 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. (shrink)

: Both Mendelssohn and Kant were strong supporters of the separation between church and state, but their arguments differed. Mendelssohn joined many others in following Locke in arguing that only freely arrived at conviction could be pleasing to God, so the state could not serve the purpose of religion in attempting to enforce it: a religious premise for religious liberty. Kant argued for religious liberty as an immediate consequence of the innate right to freedom. I suggest that Kant’s (...) straightforward argument is worth recalling in the present attack on the separation of church and state in the US and elsewhere. (shrink)