Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Alfred Cassirer

Six essays which analyze the non-national thought processes that influence culture

Language and Myth

Drawing upon a wealth of scientific, anthropological and historical date, the author examines man's efforts to understand himself and to deal with the problems of his universe through the creation and use of symbols. Analyzes the major symbolic forms of human enterprise: language, myth, art, religion, history and science. Discusses such subjects as the origins of language, doctrines of aesthetics, Frazer's theory of magic, the religious significance of taboo, the symbolic implications of philosophic thought from Heraclitus to Kierkegaard and Einstein.

An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture

An Essay on Man

The Philosophy of the Enlightenment

"Here is the first Kant-biography in English since Paulsen’s and Cassirer’s only full-scale study of Kant’s philosophy. On a very deep level, all of Cassirer’s philosophy was based on Kant’s, and accordingly this book is Cassirer’s explicit coming to terms with his own historical origins. It sensitively integrates interesting facts about Kant’s life with an appreciation and critique of his works. Its value is enhanced by Stephen K�rner’s Introduction, which places Cassirer’s Kant-interpretation in its historical and contemporary context.”--Lewis White Beck "The first English translation (well done by James Haden) of a 60-year-old classic intellectual biography. Those readers who know Kant only through the first Critique will find their understanding of that work deepened and illuminated by a long explication of the pre-critical writings, but perhaps the most distinctive contribution is Cassirer’s argument that the later Critiques, and especially the Critique of Judgment, must be understood not as merely applying the principles of the first to other areas but as subsuming the latter into a larger and more comprehensive framework.”--Frederick J. Crown, The Key Reporter "Kant’s Life and Thought is that rare achievement: a lucid and highly readable account of the life and work of one of the world’s profoundest thinkers. Now for the first time available in an admirable English translation, the book introduces the reader to two of the finest minds in the history of philosophy.”--Ashley Montagu

Kant's Life and Thought

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 (apart from Cassirer’s other papers and books) 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

Volume 2: Mythical Thought

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Examines the nature and functions of myth and its role in the development of political thought from the time of the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century

The Myth of the State

Antropologia Filosofica

Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945

Symbol, Myth, and Culture

Lo strutturalismo nella linguistica moderna

Three Volume Set

Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

W. C. Swabey

M. C. Swabey

Double-volume work features the establishment of a general philosophical system in which Einstein's theory of relativity is regarded as the natural progression of the motives inherent to mathematics and the physical sciences. 1923 edition.

Substance and Function and Einstein's Theory of Relativity

Jean Starobinski

Le problème Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Aufsätze und Abhandlungen Logos, Dike, Kosmos in der Entwicklung der griechischen Philosophie · Thorild und Herder · Galileo: a New Science and a New Spirit · Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. A Study in the History of Renaissance Ideas · The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought · Newton and Leibniz · Hermann Cohen, 1842-1918 · Some Remarks on the Question of the Originality of the Renaissance · The Place of Vesalius in the Culture of the Renaissance · Judaism and the Modern Political Myths · The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception · Galileo's Platonism · The Myth of the State · Thomas Manns Goethe-Bild. Eine Studie über "Lotte in Weimar" · Structuralism in Modern Linguistics · Albert Schweitzer as Critic of Nineteenth-Century Ethics Zur logik der Kulturwissenschaften. Fünf Studien Der Gegenstand der Kulturwissenschaft · Dingwahrnehmung und Ausdruckswahrnehmung · Naturbegriffe und Kulturbegriffe · Formproblem und Kausalproblem · Die "Tragödie der Kultur" Rousseau, Kant, Goethe. Two essays Kant and Rousseau · Goethe and the Kantian Philosophy Rezensionen und kleine Schriften Nachträge

Aufsätze und kleine Schriften 1941–1945

“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 The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with 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 a translator’s introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

Phenomenology of Cognition

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 3

Das Problem des Wechselverhältnisses zwischen Sein und Denken neu zu formulieren, ist für Cassirer die charakteristische Leistung jeder Epoche. Das erklärte Ziel des »Erkenntnisproblems in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit« ist es, die Entstehung des Grundproblems der neueren Philosophie, eben des Erkenntnisproblems, zu beleuchten und durchsichtig zu machen. Der zweite Band beginnt bei den Anfängen des Empirismus und führt seinen Gang mit der Entwicklung des Idealismus von Leibniz an und dem Fortgang der Naturwissenschaft seit Newton weiter. Beide Ströme vereinigen sich in der kritischen Philosophie Kants, in dessen System die analytische Aufgabe ihren Abschluss findet. »Hier erst«, führt Cassirer aus, »wird der letzte endgültige Schritt getan, indem das Erkennen völlig auf sich selbst gestellt und nichts mehr, im Gebiete des Seins wie des Bewußtseins, seiner eigenen Gesetzlichkeit vorangesetzt wird«. Inhalt: Die Anfänge des Empirismus, Fortbildung und Vollendung des Rationalismus, Das Erkenntnisproblem im System des Empirismus, Von Newton zu Kant, Die kritische Philosophie.

Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit. Zweiter Band

Angeregt durch die Beschäftigung mit den Problemen der modernen Erkenntniskritik erweitert Ernst Cassirer in Band 3 die Darstellung des Erkenntnisproblems in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuen Zeit über den Kreis des Kantischen Systems hinaus. Obwohl die Lösungen der nachkantischen Systeme überholt zu sein scheinen, sind die Probleme, die sie zu lösen versuchten, keineswegs erledigt. Auch in diesem Band verfolgt Cassirer zugleich ein historisches und systematisches Ziel und gruppiert die Ansätze der nachkantischen Spekulation um das Grundproblem der Methode. Es geht ihm um eine immanente Kritik der Grundfragen der verschiedenen Ansätze, denn, so Cassirer: »Bewundert viel und viel gescholten, sind die nachkantischen Systeme doch selten aus ihren eigenen gedanklichen Motiven heraus erklärt und gewürdigt worden. Eine solche Erklärung soll hier versucht werden, bevor die sachliche Kritik, die nicht zurückgehalten werden sollte, einsetzte. Fast alle großen nachkantischen Systeme teilen das geschichtliche Schicksal, dass einer unkritischen Begeisterung für sie eine ebenso unkritische Verwerfung gefolgt ist.« Zur Darstellung kommen die Lehren von Jacobi, Reinhold, Aenesidemus, Beck, Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herbart, Schopenhauer und Fries. Inhalt: Der »Gegenstand der Erfahrung« und das »Ding an sich«, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herbart, Schopenhauer, Fries.

Ernst Cassirer

Books

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