Tag Archives: Moses Mendelssohn

The Soldier, the Citizen, and the Clergyman, with a Postscript on Professors: Kant on Private Reason (Part II)

My previous post examined how Kant distinguished “public” and “private” uses of reason and discussed the differing ways in which he drew this contrast. This one will focus more narrowly on the three examples he offered: an officer following orders … Continue reading

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Culture & Civilization: The First English Translation of Mendelssohn’s Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?” (Part II)

As should be apparent by now, my collection of hobby horses includes an interest in old translations of now-familiar texts.1  The interest is not entirely idiosyncratic, nor is it entirely irrelevant to my labors in that open-ended field known as the … Continue reading

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Moses Mendelssohn, “On Enlightening the Mind”

The text that follows is the first English translation of Moses Mendelssohn’s 1784 response to the question “What is enlightenment?” The anonymous translation appeared in 1800 in the second volume of The German Museum, a short-lived journal edited by the … Continue reading

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The First English Translation of Moses Mendelssohn’s Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?”: Part I

Last summer I wrote a series of posts on the choices involved in translating Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” into English. Attempting something similar for Moses Mendelssohn’s answer to the same question, which appeared three months before … Continue reading

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