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Mendelssohn: Reasons
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[A]t other times the mature Mendelssohn begins to suspect the entire issue of idealism is misbegotten, a product of linguistic confusion. "I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher" (Gesammelte Schriften, 3/2, p. 61). Mention has already been made of Mendelssohn's view in the Prize Essay that metaphysics' necessary reliance upon artificial signs is one reason why its difficulties are more intractable than those of mathematics. In 1785, in Morning Hours, he goes further: "You know how much I am inclined to explain all disputes among philosophical schools as merely verbal disputes or at least to derive them originally from verbal disputes" (Gesammelte Schriften, 3/2, p. 104). In keeping with these advancing suspicions about the origin and the efficacy of the issue of idealism, Mendelssohn eventually comes to assign reason a mediating role in disputes between common sense and speculation. Common sense is usually but not invariably right, he contends, and hence reason's task is to present a defense of speculation when it departs from common sense.
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At the height of his career, in 1769, Mendelssohn was publicly challenged by a Christian apologist, a Zurich pastor named John Lavater, to defend the superiority of Judaism over Christianity. From then on, he was involved in defending Judaism in print. In 1783, he published Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism. This study posited that no religious institution should use coercion and emphasized that Judaism does not coerce the mind through dogma. He argued that through reason all people could discover religious philosophical truths, but what made Judaism unique was its divinely revealed code of legal, ritual and moral law. He said that Jews must live in civil society but only in a way that their right to observe religious laws is granted.
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From the beginning of his career to the end, Mendelssohn consistently upheld the demonstrability of God's existence. However, not all arguments were equally compelling in his view. In the Prize Essay he contends that probable arguments for God's existence based upon beauty, order, and design are more eloquent and edifying but less certain and convincing than strict demonstrations. Similarly, in Morning Hours, he cites the argument that the external senses' testimony to an external world is unthinkable without a necessary, extra-worldly being, but adds that this sort of argument would hardly convince an idealist, sceptic, or solipsist. There are... at least two ways in which, according to Mendelssohn, God's existence can be established with certainty. The first way is through application of the principle of sufficient reason to the certain existence of contingent things.
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