Review of Skidelsky, "Ernst Cassirer: The last philosopher of culture" [Book Review]

Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (1):pp. 116-117 (2009)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This is a curious book, because the soul of its author is torn.On the one hand, the book is a monograph on the philosopher-intellectual Ernst Cassirer. It is scholarly, noticeably well-written , philosophical to the extent that it does not distort its subject matter too much, and a splendid piece of intellectual history, which places its subject, Cassirer, in a rich cultural, historical, and intellectual context. In terms of presenting the gist of Cassirer’s thought in relatively few pages, the author does everything right, disregarding minor quibbles. So far, so good.But already reading the introduction, the author makes a confession that bathes the entire book in a different light. Here we learn that the precursor of the present tome was a “straight-faced” account of the philosopher of culture, Cassirer. But over the course of writing it, Skidelsky admits, doubts crept in. Little by little, he came to see Cassirer as a dinosaur of a past age, his philosophy as a “rearguard action on behalf of a vanishing civilization” , which died on the battlefields of the Second World War. The “Olympian” Cassirer had an “enchanting vision” and dreamt a “happy dream” of human culture, all of which went down the drain with the advent of Nazism and has now, in our own age of postmodernism, been

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-01-16

Downloads
69 (#214,873)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Sebastian Luft
Paderborn University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references