Ernst Cassirer occupies a unique space in Twentieth-century philosophy. A great liberal humanist, his multi-faceted work spans the history of philosophy, the philosophy of science, intellectual history, aesthetics, epistemology, the study of language and myth, and more. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is Cassirer's most important work. It was first published in German in 1923, the third and final volume appearing in 1929. In it Cassirer presents a radical new philosophical worldview - at once (...) rich, creative and controversial - of human beings as fundamentally "symbolic animals," placing signs and systems of expression between themselves and the world. This major new translation, the first for over fifty years, brings Cassirer's magnum opus to a new generation of students and scholars. Volume 1: Language is a fascinating examination of arguably the most fundamental of these systems of expression: human language. Cassirer traces the problem of language and expression far back in the history of philosophy, considering the work of the early Greek rationalists. He then examines the later empiricist tradition, up to the romantic tradition in the nineteenth century tackling fundamental questions about representation, signification and expression as well as language and conceptual thought in mathematics and science. Correcting important errors in previous English editions, this translation reflects the contributions of significant advances in Cassirer scholarship over the last twenty to thirty years. Each volume includes a new introduction and translator's notes by S. G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and a thorough index. (shrink)

Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in (...) philosophy made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

The paper deals with the interrelations between the philosophy, sociology and historiography of science in Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific development. First, the historiography of science provides the basis for both the philosophy and sociology of science in the sense that the fundamental questions of both disciplines depend on the principles of the form of historiography employed. Second, the fusion of the sociology and philosophy of science, as advocated by Kuhn, is discussed. This fusion consists essentially (...) in a replacement of methodological rules by cognitive values that influence the decisions of scientific communities. As a consequence, the question of the rationality of theory choice arises, both with respect to the actual decisions and to the possible justification of cognitive values and their change. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive History explores the ways interpretation shaped the analytic tradition, from Frege to Dummet. It offers readers 17 chapters, written especially for this volume by an international cast of leading scholars. Some chapters are devoted to large, thematic issues like the relationship between analytic philosophy and other philosophical traditions such as British Idealism and phenomenology, while other chapters are tied to more fine-grained topics or to individual philosophers, like Moore and Russell on philosophical method (...) or the history of interpretations of Wittgenstein’s _Tractatus_. Throughout, the focus is on interpretations that are crucial to the origin, development, and persistence of the analytic tradition. The result is a more fully formed and philosophically satisfying portrait of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The academic and humanitarian conception of harmonious union has been proposed by Professor Zhang Liwen in the 1990s. It claims to explain the specifics of Chinese civilization and proposes solution of some global problems by its means. Despite the lack of direct references to the conception, it remains in demand both in the political and ideological discourse of the People's Republic of China. This presentations deals with the historical and philosophical facts available in Chinese written monuments and works of Antiquity (...) and the Middle Ages, which are put forward as a justification for the primordial idea of harmonious union in Chinese culture. An attempt is done to show that this concept does not offer any new set of philosophical categories, but appeals to the well-known concepts of two-, three- and five-item classifications. At the same time, the emphasis is laid on the form, the method of combining opposite or dissimilar elements. In general, on the basis of the limited historical and philosophical material, it can be concluded that the concept of harmonious unification is aimed not so much at revising the composition of the philosophical system of Confucianism, but at rethinking its value criteria for interaction and mutual dependence of objects and phenomena. (shrink)

The modern era--the time period which envelops the Renaissance, Rationalism, Empiricism, and the Enlightenment--was a fundamental period in history which formed Western civilization into what we know today. These centuries in Europe have been defined by certain personages who are essential to our collective consciousness today: from Descartes, Luther, and Pascal, to Hobbes, Hume, and Kant. The History of Modern Philosophy provides a comprehensive overview of the major philosophers and philosophical currents of the period. Formed from their (...) many years of teaching, authors Fazio and Gamarra have developed a clear and precise text with substantial continuity and historical development of philosophy that will appeal to all those who wish to deepen their comprehension of the cultural and philosophical roots of our time. Mariano Fazio is a graduate of history, holds a PhD in philosophy, and is the author of several books of philosophy. He is a former rector of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and a past president of the Council of Rectors of Pontifical Roman Universities. (shrink)

On the basis of a new reading of Gérard Simon’s Kepler astronome astrologue, and by comparing the author’s position with that of Michel Foucault, this article attempts to clarify the relationship between history of science and history of knowledge. -/- .

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophy Logic Science History Acknowledgments References.

Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and (...) made conscious efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced. (shrink)

This article canvases some of the issues involved in the idea of form as a practice in Kant, Blumenberg and Foucault, and it also outlines the different contexts and approaches the individual papers collected in this Special Issue use to explore this idea.

Highlighting Hegel's conceptual realism Hoffmann focuses on an undervalued move in his dialectic: inversion. Easily proving completeness for Kant's table of categories, Hoffmann shows how metabolic dialectic substantiates Hegel's claim for his _Logic_: it is indeed the science of absolute form!

Jainism is a tradition which dates back thousands of years, which is unbelievably rich and profound, and which has certain unmistakable signs of identity. Contrary to what some might think, it is not in any sense a poor relation of Buddhism, nor is a strange, atheistic and ascetic sect within Hinduism. Jainism is, above all, the religion of non-violence (ahimsa), an ideal which all other religions of India were subsequently to make theirs and which was made universal by Gandhi in (...) the 20th century. Like Buddhism, Jainism is a religion without God which paradoxically opens to the truly sacred in the deepest reaches of all living beings in the cosmos. And it is also the religion of non-absolutism (anekantavada), a particular form of philosophical pluralism, which seems astonishingly modern. (shrink)

Voltaire’s creativity ismultifaceted, covering the problems of philosophical knowledge, the assertion of a deistic worldview, the implementation of the principles of human free will, a comprehensive critique of religion and the church, the beginning of the political concept of “educated absolutism.” The thinker became one of the greatest authorities of the French Enlightenment, being highly gifted, universally educated, owning the principles of critical thinking. The aimof this article is to determine the basic principles of the philosophical principle of deism in (...) Voltaire’s creativity and its influence on the formation of the philosophical-historical concept. The tasks of this article are perform an analysis the formation of the deistic worldview of the French thinker, the influences of the philosophy of sensualism and rationalism on the formation of the general foundations of social philosophy of the enlightener. Research methods are principles of unity of historical and logical, dialectical unity of analysis and synthesis, convergence from abstract to concrete, principles of objectivity and systematization. Research results: philosophical worldview of the XVII ‒ early XVIII centuries. had a one-sided character: on the one hand ‒ the philosophy of empiricism, based on knowledge of scientific facts using experimental methods of scientific research, and on the other ‒ rationalist philosophy, which took as primary the original theoretical generalizations. The integral system of philosophical knowledge in the first half of the eighteenth century was absent. Conclusion. The deistic foundations of Voltaire’s philosophical worldview determine not only the ontological and epistemological aspects, but undoubtedly forming the general principles of his philosophy of history, which have an abstract, mostly narrative character. However, the possibilities of a deistic worldview direct the thinker to search for an objective pattern of development of historical knowledge. They usually have a general theoretical value, as well as their practical implementation. (shrink)

[from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan (...) De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. -/- De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to introduce Wittgenstein’s concept of the form of a language into geometry and to show how it can be used to achieve a better understanding of the development of geometry, from Desargues, Lobachevsky and Beltrami to Cayley, Klein and Poincaré. Thus this essay can be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate the Picture Theory of Meaning, from the Tractatus. Its basic idea is to use Picture Theory to understand the pictures of geometry. I (...) will try to show, that the historical evolution of geometry can be interpreted as the development of the form of its language. This confrontation of the Picture Theory with history of geometry sheds new light also on the ideas of Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Cassirer counts history as a symbolic form in his list that includes myth, religion, language, art, and science, but his discussion of history is confined to a chapter in An Essay on Man. A more complete understanding requires attention to a year-long seminar he taught at Yale on “The Philosophy of History” in 1941–1942. The partially unpublished texts of this seminar are the most extended exposition of Cassirer’s conception of history as a symbolic (...) class='Hi'>form. The key source for Cassirer’s philosophy of history is Vico. Cassirer holds that “historical consciousness” is a very late product of human civilization not found before the Greeks and even with the Greeks history is not analyzed as a particular form of thought. Cassirer claims that such analysis did not appear until the eighteenth century in the work of Vico and Herder. (shrink)

Ernst Cassirer occupies a unique space in Twentieth-century philosophy. A great liberal humanist, his multi-faceted work spans the history of philosophy, the philosophy of science, intellectual history, aesthetics, epistemology, the study of language and myth, and more. Cassirer's thought also anticipates the renewed interest in the origins of analytic and continental philosophy in the Twentieth Century and the divergent paths taken by the 'logicist' and existential traditions, epitomised by his now legendary debate in 1929 (...) with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, over the question "What is the Human Being?" The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is Cassirer's most important work. It was first published in German in 1923, the third and final volume appearing in 1929. In it Cassirer presents a radical new philosophical worldview - at once rich, creative and controversial - of human beings as fundamentally "symbolic animals," placing signs and systems of expression between themselves and the world. This major new translation of all three volumes, the first for over fifty years, brings Cassirer's magnum opus to a new generation of students and scholars. Taken together, the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms are a vital treatise on human beings as symbolic animals and a monumental expression of neo-Kantian thought. Correcting important errors in previous English editions, this translation reflects the contributions of significant advances in Cassirer scholarship over the last twenty to thirty years. Each volume includes a new introduction and translator's notes by S. G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and a thorough index. (shrink)

Social science, history, and philosophy have often been neglect in thinking through their fundamentally intertwined relationship. The result is often an inattention to philosophy where social science and history is concerned, or a neglect of historicity and social analysis where philosophy is concerned. Meanwhile, the place of values in research is often uneasily passed over in silence. The inattention to, and loss of, the intersection between these different disciplines and their subject matters, leaves our investigations (...) all the more impoverished as a result. In resolving these problems, it is not enough to strive for cooperation or integration, but to rethink of the nature of the disciplines themselves; their interests, purposes, and presuppositions. In this volume, contributors explore different facets of these relationships, and move beyond the problematics erected by positivism often cast in terms of value-free or value-neutral science, that is, a science obsessed with empirical data, schematic classifications, and the pursuit of law-like forms. While positivism has been subject to critique, the influence and legacy of positivism remains. It remains in the way in which we often think about science; the line drawn between the sciences and the humanities; the norms researchers should follow; what a successful explanation looks like; and the ethical, normative, and political implications of scientific research. Aimed at students and researchers of philosophy, history and the social sciences, this book is driven by a desire to revindicate questions concerning ontology and social ontology, to rethink the nature of explanation, and to resituate normativity and values within scientific, social scientific, and historical pursuits. (shrink)

In this essay I trace the role of history in the philosophy of art from the early twentieth century to the present, beginning with the rejection of history by formalists like Clive Bell. I then attempt to show how the arguments of people like Morris Weitz and Arthur Danto led to a re-appreciation of history by philosophers of art such as Richard Wollheim, Jerrold Levinson, Robert Stecker and others.

Probes the nature of linguistic or symbolic action as it relates to specific novels, plays, and poems.

The aim of this chapter is to take a closer look at medieval discussions concerning the phenomenon of ‘perceiving as,’ and the psychological mechanisms that lie behind it. In contemporary philosophical literature this notion is usually used to refer to conceptual aspects of perception. For instance, when I perceive a black birdlike shape as a crow, I may be said to perceive the particular sensible thing x as an instance of a universal crowness φ, that is, as belonging to a (...) natural kind and falling under the concept of ‘crow’. In this sense, perceiving x as φ requires mastering the concept φ. However, I use the term ‘perceiving as’ in a wider sense and concentrate on various kinds of non-conceptual sensory processes, which can be understood as forms of ‘perceiving as’. Even though conceptual perception requires intellectual powers, medieval discussions on cognitive psychology can be understood properly only by taking into account the complex forms of perception that fall short of being truly intellectual, but are nevertheless over and above the simple sensation of sensible qualities of external things. The borderline between simple sensation and conceptual perception is unclear, and quite a lot is going on in the grey area between the two. Instead of presupposing any modern notion of ‘perceiving as’ and applying it to medieval discussions, my purpose is the opposite: to look at medieval discussions and see if they can be used to broaden modern discussions by including also non-conceptual varieties of perception. I shall begin the analysis in section two by specifying various types of cogni- tive processes that were discussed by medieval authors and can be considered as forms of ‘perceiving as’. The bulk of the historical work will be done in sec- tion three, where I focus on medieval discussions on three interrelated cogni- tive functions – perceiving different sensible qualities as a synthetic whole, incidental perception of one sensible quality through another, and the possi- bility of perceiving substances and recognising individuals. The reader should bear in mind that I shall use ideas from several medieval authors without pay- ing much attention to the differences between their theories of perception. Although occasionally radical, these differences are not highly relevant in the context of the present chapter. In section four, I propose two theoretical mod- els that can be used for analysing medieval views concerning these psychologi- cal phenomena. Finally, I conclude the chapter by making some remarks on the potential impacts of reading medieval views in relation to the concept of ‘perceiving as’. (shrink)

Probes the nature of linguistic or symbolic action as it relates to specific novels, plays, and poems.

Across the globe, education has recently been through a major semantic shift, where new notions such as ‘learning’, ‘competences’, ‘projects’ came to replace or complement an older, more established, educational vocabulary. The political approach to education has also evolved, as many authors have underlined, from established national forms of governing to global, transnational forms of governance. These evolutions, often abbreviated to shifts ‘from teaching to learning’ and ‘from governing to governance’ have resonated globally and attracted the attention of researchers. Most (...) sociological accounts of such evolutions attribute them to the development and primacy of a preponderant logic, generally politics/power, culture or the economy. Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, on which we draw in this article, suggests to start from a different, opposite, premise: not the predominance but instead the lack of any predominant logic characterizes modernity. The functional differentiation of modern society into a multiplicity of—specific yet universal—systems should therefore be the pivotal point that helps make sense of these transformations. We argue that the very coexistence of such systems, their simultaneous and therefore uncoordinated existences, increases the complexity of the social world tremendously and leaves them with an uncertain future. The so-called turns to governance and to learning, we argue, should be understood, respectively, as political and educational attempts to deal with this loss of direction. (shrink)

Richard Rorty thinks that Martin Heidegger is necessarily impaled on the horns of a dilemma in regard to the history and historicity of Being. The thrust of Rorty's criticism of Heidegger is aimed at the supposed vacuity of Heidegger's thought of Being without beings. In order to overcome this vacuity, Rorty thinks that Heidegger has recourse to the history of beings. But the form ordinary history takes for Rorty's Heidegger is the alienated form of the (...) history of philosophy. The criticism thus has three steps. First, Being without being is a vacuous notion. Second, this vacuity is overcome through a consideration of the history of philosophy. That is, Heidegger might be equally unable to determine the truth of Being without recourse to his version of the history of philosophy. Rorty's criticism of Heidegger in regard to the possibility for thinking at the end of philosophy is coordinated with a second criticism. (shrink)

Philosophy is often taken to be something that is always possible, so that everyone is fully entitled sketching a ‘philosophy’ of his/her own. Nevertheless, it is widely assumed that philosophy began in Miletus with Thales. But it is equally well known that the Presocratics remained unaware of being philosophers, and therefore could not even have wanted to be identified that way. These three points are not mutually compatible. So, what lies behind them? What is escaping our attention (...) when we state them? Probably an event in Plato’s life that has too often gone unnoticed: the key role he played in giving form and substance to philosophy, and in getting it to take root once and for all. Failure to acknowledge how, when, and on whose initiative philosophy came to occupy a very important place in Western culture and education for two and a half millennia; not including a note on this process in biographies of Plato; and overlooking another key event that probably occurred about 350-45 BC - these are just some of the unwelcome effects linked to the usual silence about the period in which philosophy took form. (shrink)

Here at last is an American counterpart to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. The eminent historian Bruce Kuklick tells the fascinating story of the growth of philosophical thinking in the USA, in the context of the intellectual and social changes of the times. Kuklick sketches the genesis of these intellectual practices in New England Calvinism and the writing of Jonathan Edwards. He discusses theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the origins of collegiate philosophy in (...) the early part of the nineteenth century. We see the development of secular preconceptions and the emergence, after Darwin's writings of the mid-late nineteenth century, of forms of thought hostile to religion. Philosophy is situated in a variety of cultural contexts - the ministry, the growing system of higher learning, the conflict between philosophers and theologians and between amateur and professional thinkers, the suspicion of European ideas, and worries about the relevance of philosophy to public and political life. Kuklick's narrative portrays such great thinkers as Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, C. I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, W. V. Quine, and Richard Rorty, and assesses their contributions to philosophy. He brings us right up to date with the first historical treatment of the period after pragmatism, and the fragmentation of philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Kuklick steers a controversial course between the divergent views that historians and philosophers take of the significance of philosophy in recent years. Anyone interested in American intellectual history, or in how philosophy got where it is today, will enjoy this book. (shrink)

Philosophy of history is analyzed here from the point of its epistemological and ontological meaning. The author considers that the ontological point of view makes it possible to conceptualize the history as the unity of its all times - Past, Present and Future. The connection between these three times based on their relation to the concept of Eternity which has been symbolically formed within the mythological, religious and utopian Weltanschauung. The necessity of these relations transforms philosophy (...) of history into a special kind of ontological historical knowledge. The study of history from the prospect of unity is only possible within the historical interpretation of Future as an epoch of bridging the gap between Time and Eternity. Author calls this philosophical concept the Time of Freedom. (shrink)

The theoretical problems of historiography derive chiefly from an ambiguity at the heart of the historian's task; historiography is uncertain as to its own theoretical character, that is, its character and status as a mode of knowing. On the one hand, historiography is oriented wholly toward the concrete, toward its rich and inexhaustible determination in quality; moreover, the concrete toward which it is oriented, is not statuesque, substantively plural and fixed, but fluid, dynamic, continuous. Such concretion can be fixed and (...) rendered for expression and communication only in narration, in images, therefore; as a consequence, written history appears in its own self-consciousness, that is to historiography, most immediately as art. The subsumption of history under the general concept of art as a form of knowing, however, is attended by insuperable difficulties. Chief among these is the fact that the concrete to which history, that is, written history, is addressed is the existent concrete; but the images of art, patently, are unsusceptible of the character of existence, save obliquely and typically. The forms of art, its images, are structures of pure quality, devoid of any determination of real and unreal, of any determination of existence, while the images of history are images of the real. But the character of existence cannot be intrinsic to any image, it cannot be simply a quality among qualities: it is rather the determination of quality to actuality which it does not possess simply as quality. The character of existence cannot consequently pertain to the images of history as images but must accede to them by a further theoretical act beyond that by which the image is evoked. This further act can only be logical. Existence must enjoy the status of logical predicate, not of esthetic quality. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of controversies in the history of Chinese philosophy concerning the diversity of meanings of the term Li , as well as the comparative issues raised in various attempts by modern Chinese and Western interpreters to come to terms with this diversity of meanings. Revisiting the earliest pre-philosophical uses of the term, an attempt is then made to synthesize the insights of previous interpreters and open up a new path for investigating its distinctive implications (...) in classical Chinese thought, Chinese Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism. (shrink)

The history of ideas deals with the elemental unit-ideas which for Lovejoy are components of systems distinguished by their patterns. Special histories explain how a particular form of human history developed. General histories draw on special histories to document or explain social contexts. Since patterns influence philosophers, the history of ideas contributes little to the history of philosophy, a discontinuous strand within a period's continuous intellectual history. By accepting cultural pluralism, denying the monistic (...) position that there always are internal connections among all or some strands of intellectual and cultural history, both continuity and change in philosophy can be best understood. (shrink)