Moses Mendelssohn

Anti-Dogma in Moses Mendelssohn's Thought: Tolerance, Religion and Intellect (Hebrew)

by Amir Mashiach

Oreshet 1 (2010), pp. 239-251.

DID PLATO NEARLY DISCOVER SYNTHETIC JUDGMENTS A PRIORI?

by Courtney Fugate

This is the reviewed version of a paper that will appear in Skepsis: A Journal for Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Research, 2012. Please refer only to the published version.

In this paper I argue that Kant’s Plato is in fact a complex fiction arising from at least four distinct sources:... more In this paper I argue that Kant’s Plato is in fact a complex fiction arising from at least four distinct sources: Brucker's Historia Critica, Moses Mendelsohn's Phaedon, the younger Kant of the Precritical period and, finally, the writings of Georg Schlosser. I use these sources to explain the complex and often conflicting picture we get of Plato in Kant's later writings, in particular the distinction Kant makes between Plato the Academic and Plato the Letter Writer. The paper shows how Kant formulates the former Plato as a sympathetic proxy for Moses Mendelssohn and for Kant’s younger self, and the latter as proxy for Johann Georg Schlosser, who in Kant's view is a mystical enemy of the critical philosophy. The paper also explains how Kant creates a fictional tale of the genesis of Plato's philosophy, one built essentially on the path taken by the younger Kant himself, in order to suggest that it arose as part of a genuine attempt to explain the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori.

review of Michah Gottlieb _Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn's Theological-Political Thought_

by Jeffrey Bernstein

forthcoming in International Journal of the Platonic Tradition

Sprachphilosophie bei Moses Mendelssohn

by Alexandra Chava Seymann

The Moral Value of Artistic Beauty in Kant

by Joseph Cannon

Published in Kantian Review (16.1 March 2011), with comment by Paul Guyer and reply by the author

In § 42 of the third Critique, ‘On the intellectual interest in the beautiful,’ Kant claims that it is ‘always the... more In § 42 of the third Critique, ‘On the intellectual interest in the beautiful,’ Kant claims that it is ‘always the mark of a good soul’ (5:298) to take an ‘immediate interest’ in natural beauty because it indicates a moral interest in harmony between nature and moral freedom. In the same pages, however, he denies the possibility of a similarly morally significant interest in artistic beauty. This paper argues that according to his own theory of fine art Kant ought not to deny this value to artistic beauty. In the pages that immediately follow his discussion of immediate interest Kant defines artistic beauty as the joint product of a ‘natural gift’ of genius and a freely exercised discipline of skill and taste. This commits him to the claim that artistic beauty embodies and expresses a harmony between nature and freedom in the productive act of a human being, and thus to the claim that one can take an immediate and morally significant interest in artistic beauty, just as much as in natural beauty.