Lokale und globale Idealisierungen: Das Wissenschaftsmodell von Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer’s epistemological trilogy – Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie and Determinismus und Indeterminismus – is well known to Western scholars, some of whom recently devoted a number of in-depth and interesting studies to Cassirer’s epistemology. Nonetheless, they overlooked aspects of Cassirer’s concept of idealisation and his model of science as found in his last epistemological work: Determinismus und Indeterminismus. In this essay I will consider these two almost disregarded aspects of Cassirer’s epistemology in order to provide a better understanding of his idea of science.