There is widespread agreement in scholarship that Moses Mendelssohn lacked historical thinking, an opinion accepted even among Mendelssohn experts. This misjudgment is based on a remark in his Jerusalem against Lessing’s Education of Humankind and surely ignores Mendelssohn’s historical work. I will question the misjudgment by a detour: first, I will ask for whom Lessing wrote his Education of Humankind. Then I will turn to the usually celebrated origin of historical thinking in Semler and Herder and question the historicity of (...) their views. It is only in the 3rd section that I will focus directly on Mendelssohn’s historical work and his truly historical understanding of religion, in agreement with Lessing. (shrink)

In Being after Rousseau, Richard L. Velkley presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the founder of a modern European tradition of reflection on the relation of philosophy to culture—a reflection that calls both into question.

Most scholars think not. But in this pioneering book, John H. Zammito challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know.