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129 books match the query 'Individual Philosophers' and 3 start with l

cover of Last Works

Last Works

Moses Mendelssohn. Translated by Bruce Rosenstock

University of Illinois Press, 2012

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the central figure in the emancipation of European Jewry. His intellect, judgment, and tact won the admiration and friendship of contemporaries as illustrious as Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Immanuel Kant. His enormously influential Jerusalem (1783) made the case for religious tolerance, a cause he worked for all his life.
 
Last Works includes, for the first time complete and in a single volume, the English translation of Morning Hours: Lectures on the Existence of God (1785) and To the Friends of Lessing (1786). Bruce Rosenstock has also provided an historical introduction and an extensive philosophical commentary to both texts.
 
At the center of Mendelssohn's last works is his friendship with Lessing. Mendelssohn hoped to show that he, a Torah-observant Jew, and Lessing, Germany's leading dramatist, had forged a life-long friendship that held out the promise of a tolerant and enlightened culture in which religious strife would be a thing of the past.
 
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. Morning Hours treats a range of major philosophical topics: the nature of truth, the foundations of human knowledge, the basis of our moral and aesthetic powers of judgment, the reality of the external world, and the grounds for a rational faith in a providential deity. It is also a key text for Mendelssohn's readings of Spinoza. In To the Friends of Lessing, Mendelssohn attempts to unmask the individual whom he believes to be the real enemy of the enlightened state: the Schwärmer, the religious fanatic who rejects reason in favor of belief in suprarational revelation.
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cover of Law and the Good Life: On the Political Philosophy of Aristotle

Law and the Good Life

On the Political Philosophy of Aristotle

Robert C. Bartlett

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A fresh reading of the relationship between moral and political philosophy in Aristotle’s thought.

Our democracies promise the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—at least, within the confines of the law. Yet the law is an ineffective guide to the good life; laws can be arbitrary, even immoral. What other limit, then, should direct us as we pursue our own fulfillment? 

In Law and the Good Life, philosopher Robert C. Bartlett examines Aristotle’s consideration of this question. Rather than defer to authority, Aristotle invites us to ground ourselves in moral virtue and intellectual fulfillment, an argument he develops in both Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. As political creatures, Aristotle tells us, we are capable of moral action and therefore must embrace that capacity; at the same time, as rational creatures, we must understand what is true, even without regard to action. In taking these insights together, Bartlett offers a new reading of Aristotle’s political philosophy, one he hopes might serve as a prudent lodestar in our own turbulent times.

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cover of Leo Strauss on Hobbes

Leo Strauss on Hobbes

Leo Strauss

University of Chicago Press, 0

Leo Strauss’s final seminar on Thomas Hobbes, representing the culmination of more than four decades of close engagement.

Leo Strauss spent more than four decades studying the work of Thomas Hobbes. In Strauss’s distinctive genealogy of political thought, Hobbes emerges as a decisive counterpoint, not only to the Ancients, but also to Strauss’s own project. Strauss saw Hobbes as both the founder of modern natural rights and the modern esoteric writer par excellence.

Strauss’s final seminar on Hobbes from 1964 is the culmination of his engagement with Hobbes’s corpus and contains the richest account of Strauss’s final insight into the nerve of Hobbes’s thought, linking human consciousness to power and passion. The seminar reflects on the tension between Hobbes’s scientific and political frameworks, Hobbes’s emphasis on rights over duties, Hobbes’s atheism, and Hobbes’s attention to causal thinking as the core capacity that sets humans apart from other animals. It also includes Strauss’s most sustained exchange with the Marxist political theorist, C. B. Macpherson. Their rival interpretations of why the state of nature takes the form of a war of all against all led Strauss to reconsider his earlier writings on Hobbes, including those parts that pertain to other thinkers, such as Aristotle, Locke, and Spinoza.

With an introductory essay by Karl Dahlquist that traces the evolution of Strauss’s thinking on Hobbes and frames Strauss’s dialogue with Macpherson, this 1964 seminar on Hobbes is a vital contribution to political thought and intellectual history.

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