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)

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 2: Mythical Thought considers the role of myth in human thought and expression. Cassirer examines the main features of morphology of myth before tackling the relationship between myth and self-consciousness. He argues that human beings' experience of the world around them is charged with affective and emotional significance, as desirable or hateful, comforting or threatening. It is this type of meaning which underlies mythical consciousness and explains its disregard for the distinction between appearance and reality. From mythical thought religion and art develop, Cassirer argues, making the mythical view of the world the earliest form of philosophical expression. 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)

"In his Phenomenology of Cognition, Cassirer provides a comprehensive and systematic account of the dynamic process involved in the whole of human culture as it progresses from the world of myth and its feeling of social belonging to the highest abstractions of mathematics, logic and theoretical physics. Cassirer engages with the most sophisticated and cutting-edge work in fields ranging from ethnology to classics, egyptology and assyriology to ethology, brain science and psychology to logic, mathematics and theoretical physics. His command of (...) philosophy, literature, and the arts is superb. Echoing his work on Kant, Cassirer begins ThePhilosophy of Symbolic Formswith the problem posed by the meaning of being for philosophy since Plato. But Cassirer also shows that this problem gains new significance with Kant and with the development of modern culture. Cassirer weaves his conception of the development of knowledge into a broadly Kantian and German idealist dynamic-historical conception of significance and of experience that refuses to accept a fundamental opposition between literary, philosophical and scientific culture. In consequence of his great vision grounded in careful reflection and argument, Cassirer's systematic conception of the Copernican cosmopolitan-cosmological revolution is still philosophically and scientifically unmatched in contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the Pacific." - Pierre Keller, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside, USA. This new translation makes Cassirer's seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes an introduction by Steve Lofts, a foreword by Peter Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index. Steve Lofts is Professor of Philosophy at King's University College, Canada. He is the translator of Cassirer's The Logic of the Cultural Sciences and The Warburg Years : Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology. (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. 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)

v. 1. Language.--v. 2. Mythical thought.--v. 3. The phenomenology of knowledge.--v. 4. The metaphysics of symbolic forms.

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

At his death in 1945, the influential German philosopher Ernst Cassirer left manuscripts for the fourth and final volume of his magnum opus, _The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene have edited these writings and translated them into English for the first time, bringing to completion Cassirer's major treatment of the concept of symbolic form. Ernst Cassirer believed that all the forms of representation that human beings use—language, myth, art, religion, history, (...) science—are symbolic, and the concept of symbolic forms was the basis of his thinking on these subjects. In this volume, which contains one text written in 1928 and another in about 1940, Cassirer presents the metaphysics that is implicit in his epistemology and phenomenology of culture. The earlier text grounds the philosopher's conception of symbolic forms on a notion of human nature that makes a general distinction between Geist and life. In the later text, he discusses Basis Phenomena, an original concept not mentioned in any of his previous works, and he compares his own viewpoint with those of other modern philosophers, notably Bergson and Heidegger. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

Investigating the neo-Kantian origins of structuralism and culturalism, this article analyses the development of Cassirer's thought by following his intellectual progression from knowledge to culture, and from culture to praxis. The article is in two parts. In the first part, the author presents an analysis of Cassirer's relational conception of knowledge. In the second part, the critique of knowledge is superseded by a critique of culture. The author analyses Cassirer's anthropological philosophy of symbolic forms and critically compares (...) it to Simmel's vitalist theory of culture. The article ends with a plea for a practical sociology inspired by Cassirer's return to Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

This paper aims at focusing on Cassirer's relationship with Hegel during the crucial period when Cassirer is outlining and completing the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in the early 1920s. The main thesis is that Cassirer has never abandoned his original Neo-Kantian approach, despite the fact that it has been enriched within the perspective of a philosophy of culture indebted to some extent also to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. However, Cassirer maintains that Kant's critical idealism must be (...) contrasted with Hegel's absolute idealism, keeping thereby open the process of the spirit that cannot close itself in a definitive logical structure. This critical stance is shared by some contemporaries of Cassirer such as Dilthey, Windelband, and above all Natorp. We have thus to read Cassirer's project against the historical backdrop of the ‘Hegel-Renaissance’ in Germany, a circumstance that, according to the author, can contribute to a more adequate understanding of Cassirer's opus magnum. (shrink)

To commemorate the centenary of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms this essay focuses on how Cassirer in the development of a distinctive philosophical method analyzed the newest development within philosophy and science. Discussing Einstein's theory of relativity and Russell's formal logic Cassirer found tools to expand the critique of reason into a critique of culture. The course of argumentation is as follows. At the outset Cassirer's outline of the idea of The Philosophy of (...) class='Hi'>Symbolic Forms in the 1920 book Einstein's Theory of Relativity is presented as a reaction to the increasing distance between theoretical physics and ordinary experience. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms can be read as an answer to an inner methodological demand within critical idealism. I encircle this motif in Cassirer's comment that Plato's idealism, understood as the dianoia of thought, is reiterated in Kant's transcendental philosophy and Herman Cohen's reception of Kant. This leads to a discussion of how Cassirer breaks away from Cohen by the positive reception of Russell's symbolic logic. Finally, I present the theory of functional concepts developed by Cassirer (1910) in the book Substance and Function as a prerequisite for the conception of a plural but systematic philosophy of symbolic forms. (shrink)

Introduction: schema, substance, and symbol -- Linguistic form: the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture -- Mythical thought: beginning the ladder of consciousness -- Phenomenology of knowledge: taking phenomenology in the Hegelian, not the modern sense -- Metaphysics of symbolic forms: spirit, life, and Werk -- Logic of the cultural sciences: nature and culture -- Animal symbolicum -- Human freedom and politics.

This paper pursues the double task of presenting Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a systematic critique of culture and assessing this systematic approach with regards to the question of reason vs. relativism. First, it reconstructs the development of his theory to its mature presentation in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer here presents a critique of culture as fulfilling Kant’s critical work by insisting on the plurality of reason as spirit, manifesting itself in (...) symbolic forms. In the second part, the consequences of this approach will be drawn by considering the systematics Cassirer intended with this theory. As can be reconstructed from his metaphilosophical reflections, the strength of Cassirer’s philosophy is that it accounts for the plurality of rational-spiritual activity while at the same time not succumbing to a relativism. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms steers a middle course between a rational fundamentalism and a postmodern relativism. (shrink)

The final volume in the fine translation of Cassirer's central work deals with the problem of knowledge, "the structure and articulation of a theoretical world view." The analysis proceeds from perception and representation, through the function of signification and the idea of concept, to mathematics and the highest forms of natural science. Cassirer's introduction offers a concise discussion in historical context of the idea of symbolic form itself.--F. M. S.

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

The historical beginnings of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture remain unclear. For it is not apparent how his major philosophy of culture and the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, published in the 1920s, emerged from his earlier epistemological work and Substance and Function from 1910. However, this gap can be filled to a certain extent by the “Disposition” of a “Philosophy of the Symbolic” from 1917 that could be reconstructed from Cassirer’s literary estate and (...) is documented in this contribution. In the preceding “Introduction” an overview of Cassirer’s text is given and some consequences for our general understanding of Cassirer’s project of a philosophy of culture are put up for discussion. (shrink)

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 (...) class='Hi'>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. (shrink)

This is the first full-length, systematic study of Ernst Cassirer's fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, which was published in the German edition in 1995 and in the American edition in 1996 from Cassirer's Nachlass. Prior to the appearance of this volume it was generally held that Cassirer had little interest in a metaphysics of symbolic forms and had not formulated such. ;This study considers the nature (...) of the basic elements of Cassirer's metaphysics as they appear in this fourth volume and as they are connected to comments in other of his works. It also considers to what extent Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms requires a metaphysical grounding in a traditional sense. ;Part I is an analysis of Cassirer's writings of the 1920s concerning his distinction between life and spirit , their dialectical relationship and their connection to the conception of symbolic form. Highly significant is Cassirer's assertion in a fragment from this period that philosophy is not itself a symbolic form. ;Part II is an analysis of Cassirer's writings of the 1940s concerning his conception of three "basis phenomena" --the life-process and the I, action and the Other, and the sphere of work . Of particular importance is Cassirer's final description of the philosophy of symbolic forms as a Socratic philosophy grounded in the basis phenomenon of work. ;The study contains an appendix showing an analytic scheme of the volume and a comprehensive bibliography of Cassirer's works and critical literature relevant to the interpretation of his systematic philosophy. (shrink)

The paper offers a systematic historical analysis of the origins, the meaning and the extension of the basic concept of Cassirer´s philosophy of the later period, seen from various points of view. Its main object is Cassirer's essay of 1921, in which his only explicit definition oh this concept can be find. Further the author examines, to what extent the philosophy of symbolic forms turned away from the "orthodox" neokantism , as well as the impact the (...) discussions of the nature and status of Geisteseissenschaften had on Cassirer´s articulation of the universal symbolist philosophy of culture. (shrink)