Provides a reading of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms in the context of contemporary continental philosophy.

This new translation of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences _ _makes Ernst Cassirer’s classic study, long out of print, available to English readers. A German Jew living in exile at the beginning of the Second World War, Cassirer wrote this book—one of his clearest and most concise—in response to the crises besetting his era. It represented to him a rethinking and completion of his magnum opus _The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. _S. G. Lofts’s translation stays close to the original (...) German and accurately reflects the echoes of the philosophical debates of Cassirer’s day. In the book’s five linked studies, Cassirer considers the intellectual structure of the disciplines we commonly refer to as the humanities. He defines and justifies the basic philosophical perspective of the philosophy of symbolic forms, and he contributes a wealth of ideas to continuing debates about culture and what is unique in human nature. (shrink)

Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was a leading proponent of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer’s discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence—that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of word and image, that it is in and through the symbolic cultural systems of language, art, myth, religion, science, and technology that human life realizes itself and attains not only its form, (...) its visibility, but also its reality. Thought and being are set in opposition and united in genuine correspondence by the symbolic strife between them that Cassirer calls _Auseinandersetzung,_ which determines the ethical relationship of the self to the other. (shrink)