Symbolic Forms and the Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Cassirer in Context and Influence

In Luigi Filieri & Anne Pollok (eds.), The Method of Culture. Bologna: Editioni ETS. pp. 261-278 (2021)
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Abstract

My paper will analyze Cassirer’s logic of the cultural sciences as it developed in close engagement with work on logic, psychology, biology, and linguistics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paper focuses on Chajim Steinthal, who sees the “expressive form” of language as a natural function of human engagement with the environment, developing independently of logic. When read in the context of his engagement with Steinthal, the biologist Uexküll, and the neuroscientist Kurt Goldstein, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms reimagines the role of logic and language in the construction of the cultural world. This provides a reading of what Cassirer means by the logic of the cultural sciences, and what he means by culture itself. My reading highlights the tension, which I argue stems from Steinthal’s earlier work, between the assertion that phenomena including linguistic expression, living beings, and consciousness develop independently of a unifying logic, and Cassirer’s assertion that we live in a common, objective human world.

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Lydia Patton
Virginia Tech

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References found in this work

Logic from Kant to Russell.Sandra Lapointe (ed.) - 2018 - New York: Routledge.
Inner Experience and Articulation: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Foundational Project and the Charge of Psychologism.Katherina Kinzel - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (2):347-375.
Our Science Must Establish Itself.Stefan Reiners - 2020 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10 (1):234-253.
Cassirer and Goldstein on Abstraction and the Autonomy of Biology.M. Chirimuuta - 2020 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10 (2):471-503.

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