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Ernst Cassirer occupies a unique place in twentieth-century philosophy. More than any other German philosopher since Kant, dissertation advisor role, Cassirer thus aims to devote equal philosophical attention both to the mathematical and natural sciences Naturwissenschaften and to the more humanistic disciplines Geisteswissenschaften.
In this way, Cassirer, more than any other twentieth-century philosopher, plays a fundamental mediating role between C. Cassirer was born on July 28,to a wealthy and cosmopolitan Jewish family, in the German city of Breslau now Wroclaw, Poland.
Cassirer entered the University of Berlin in Upon returning to Berlin indissertation advisor role, Cassirer further developed these themes while working out his monumental interpretation of the development of modern philosophy and science from the Renaissance through Kant [Cassirera]. The first volume of this work served as his habilitation at the University of Berlin, where he taught as an instructor or Privatdozent from to In Cassirer was finally offered professorships at two newly founded universities at Frankfurt and Hamburg under the auspices of the Weimar Republic.
He taught at Hamburg from until emigrating from Germany in After his emigration Cassirer spent two years lecturing at Oxford and then six years at the University of Göteborg in Sweden. During this time he developed his most sustained discussion of morality and the philosophy of law as a study of the Swedish legal philosopher Axel Hägerström [Cassirer a] see [Kroischap.
Cassirer, like so many German émigrés during this period including Carnap then finally settled in the United States. He taught at Yale from to and at Columbia in — One can only speculate on what this influence might have been if his life had not been cut short suddenly by a heart attack while walking on the streets of New York City on April 13, The latter, in particular, is a magisterial and deeply original contribution to both the history of philosophy and the history of science.
Burtt, E. Dijksterhuis, and Alexandre Koyré, who developed this theme later in the century in the course of establishing the discipline of history of science as we know it today see, dissertation advisor role, e.
Cassirer must thus be ranked as one of the very greatest intellectual historians of the twentieth-century — and, indeed, as one of the founders of this discipline as it dissertation advisor role to be practiced after He continued to contribute to intellectual history broadly conceived throughout his career most notably, perhaps, in his fundamental studies of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment [Cassirer a, ]and he had a major influence dissertation advisor role intellectual history throughout the century.
Aside from the history of science see above dissertation advisor role, Cassirer also decisively influenced intellectual historians more generally, including, notably, the eminent intellectual and cultural historian Peter Gay and the distinguished art historian Erwin Panofsky see, e. For Cohen, this process is modelled on the methods of the infinitesimal calculus in this connection, especially, see [Cohen ].
Beginning with the idea of a continuous series or function, our problem is to see how such a series can be a priori generated step-by-step. The mathematical concept of a differential shows us how this can be done, for the differential at a point in the domain of a given function indicates how it is to be continued on dissertation advisor role points.
The differential therefore infinitesimally captures the rule of the series as a whole, and thus expresses, at any given point or moment of time, the general form of the series valid for all times. This theory, for Cassirer, dissertation advisor role, is an artifact of traditional Aristotelian logic; and his main idea, accordingly, is that developments in modern formal logic the mathematical theory of relations allows us dissertation advisor role to reject such abstractionism and thus philosophical empiricism on behalf of the genetic conception of knowledge.
In this way, dissertation advisor role, we dissertation advisor role conceive all the structures in our sequence as continuously converging, as it were, on a final or limit structure, such that all previous structures in the sequence are approximate special or limiting cases of this final structure.
The idea of such an endpoint of the sequence is only a regulative ideal in the Kantian sense — it is only progressively approximated but never in fact actually realized. In explicitly embracing late nineteenth-century work on the foundations of mathematics, Cassirer comes into very close proximity with early twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Indeed, Cassirer takes the modern mathematical logic implicit in the work of Dedekind and Hilbert, and explicit in the work of Gottlob Frege and the early Bertrand Russell, as providing us with our primary tool for moving beyond the empiricist abstractionism due ultimately to Aristotelian syllogistic.
Nevertheless, and here is where Cassirer diverges from most of the analytic tradition, this modern theory of the concept only provides dissertation advisor role with a genuine and complete alternative to Aristotelian abstractionism and philosophical empiricism when it is embedded within the genetic conception of knowledge.
For we no longer require that any particular mathematical structure be fixed for all time, but only that the historical-developmental sequence dissertation advisor role such structures continuously converge.
So it is no wonder that, subsequent to taking up the professorship at Hamburg inCassirer devotes the rest of his career to this new philosophy of symbolic forms.
At Hamburg Cassirer found a tremendous resource for the next stage in his philosophical development — the Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg. Warburg was an eminent art historian with a particular interest in ancient cult, ritual, myth, and magic as sources of archetypal forms of emotional expression later manifested in Renaissance art, and the Library therefore contained abundant materials both on artistic and cultural history and on ancient myth and ritual.
In particular, they lie at a deeper, dissertation advisor role, autonomous level of spiritual life which then gives rise to the more sophisticated forms by a dialectical developmental process. From mythical thought, religion and art develop; from natural language, theoretical science develops. The most basic and primitive type of symbolic meaning is expressive meaning, the product of what Cassirer calls the expressive function Ausdrucksfunktion of thought, which is concerned with the experience of events in the world around us as charged with affective and emotional significance, as desirable or hateful, comforting or threatening.
It is this type of meaning that underlies mythical consciousness, for Cassirer, and which explains its most distinctive feature, namely, its total disregard for the distinction between appearance and reality.
Similarly, there is no essential difference in efficacy between the living and the dead, between waking experiences and dreams, between the name of an object and the object itself, and so on.
Working together with the fundamentally pragmatic orientation towards the world exhibited in the technical and instrumental dissertation advisor role of tools and artifacts, it is in natural language, according to Cassirer, that the representative function of thought is then most clearly visible.
We are now able to distinguish the enduring thing-substance, on the one side, from its variable manifestations from different points of view and on different occasions, on the other, and we thereby arrive at a new fundamental distinction between appearance and reality.
This distinction is then expressed in its most developed form, dissertation advisor role, for Cassirer, in the linguistic notion of propositional truth and thus in the propositional copula. The distinction between appearance and reality, as expressed in the propositional copula, then leads dialectically to a new task of thought, the task of theoretical science, dissertation advisor role systematic inquiry into the realm of truths.
So it is here, and only here, that the generalized and purified form of neo- Kantianism distinctive of the Marburg School gives an accurate characterization of human thought.
Recent commentators [Skidelsky ] [Moss ] have illuminatingly built on this circumstance in further articulating the relationship between Cassirer and Hegel. Hegel had conceived nature Natur and spirit Geist as two different expressions of a single divine infinite Reason, which manifests itself temporally from two different points of view.
Dissertation advisor role project of an encyclopedia of philosophical sciences had three parts, the logic, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of spirit, where the logic had the task of depicting the dialectical conceptual structure of infinite divine Reason itself. But this Hegelian project for securing the ultimate logico-metaphysical identity of nature and spirit found ever fewer followers as the century progressed, dissertation advisor role, as the rising tide of neo-Kantianism — aided by further developments within the natural sciences instigated by Hermann von Helmholtz — undermined the appeal of the original Naturphilosophie of Schelling and Hegel together with their Absolute Reason.
The result was the problem of dissertation advisor role Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften as it presented itself to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet dissertation advisor role also have the capacity, dissertation advisor role, in the cultural sciencesto extend such meanings beyond their originally local contexts. Whereas intersubjective validity in the natural sciences rests on universal laws of nature ranging over all physical places and times, an analogous type of intersubjective validity arises in the cultural sciences independently of such laws.
Universal cultural meaning thereby emerges only asymptotically, in a way similar to the genetic conception of knowledge of the Marburg School now seen as based on the significative function of thought. Rather than an abstract mathematical relation of backwards-directed inclusion, however, we are concerned, in the historical cultural sciences, with a hermeneutical relation of backwards-directed interpretation and reinterpretation — and, as a result, there is no possibility, in these sciences, of reliably predicting the future.
Inhowever, Cassirer published a review of [Heidegger ], which took a different approach from his remarks dissertation advisor role Davos. By building the Marburg conception of knowledge, in his new philosophy of dissertation advisor role, on top of the more primitive forms of mythical thought [ Ausdruckswahrnehmen ] and ordinary language [ Dingwahrnehmen ], Cassirer takes himself to have done justice to the insights of both Hegel and Heidegger while avoiding both the infinite divine reason of the former and the radical human finitude of the latter.
In the case of the idea of transcendental freedom, for example, we are only able to determine it negatively from a theoretical point of viewas a species of causality that is not bound by the conditions of time-determination governing the phenomenal world. In the Critique of Practical Reasonhowever, Kant asserts that transcendental freedom acquires a determinate content from pure practical reason, through our immediate awareness of the moral law as normatively binding on our will as a fact of reasonand that the practical objective reality thereby conferred on this idea can then be transferred to the ideas of God and Immortality.
This is because the moral law unconditionally commands us to seek the Highest Good — the realization of the Kingdom of Ends here on earth — which is an infinite task requiring infinite practical faith and hope. The resulting divergence from the indeterminate and merely potential infinity arising within theoretical reason is visible in the famous passage on the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me at the end of the Critique of Practical Reasonfrom which Cassirer quotes in his review of Heidegger.
But Cassirer, as we have just seen, has now achieved a parallel result though his methodological distinction between the natural and the cultural sciences. But, at the same time, we thereby also avoid fatalistic pessimism with its prophecies and visions of decline. Krois and E.
Schwemmer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte. Hamburg: Meiner. Einstein, Albert: philosophy of science general relativity: early philosophical interpretations of Heidegger, Martin Kant, Immanuel Natorp, Paul Schlick, Moritz Vienna Circle. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © by The Metaphysics Research Labdissertation advisor role, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University. Menu Browse Table of Contents What's New Random Dissertation advisor role Chronological Archives About Editorial Information About dissertation advisor role SEP Editorial Board How to Cite the SEP Special Characters Advanced Tools Contact Support SEP Support the SEP PDFs for SEP Friends Make a Donation SEPIA for Libraries.
Entry Navigation Entry Contents Bibliography Academic Tools Friends PDF Preview Author and Citation Info Back to Top. Ernst Cassirer First published Wed Jun 30, ; substantive revision Fri Mar 18, Biography 2. Early Historical Writings 3. Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science 4. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 5. Cassirer, Hegel and the Cultural Sciences Bibliography Selected works by Cassirer: Secondary and Other Relevant Literature: Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries.
Biography Cassirer was born on July 28,to a wealthy and cosmopolitan Jewish family, in the German city of Breslau now Wroclaw, Poland, dissertation advisor role. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms At Hamburg Cassirer dissertation advisor role a tremendous resource for the next stage in his philosophical development — the Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg. Marburg: Elwert. Erster Band, dissertation advisor role. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer. Zweiter Band.
Translated as Substance and Function. Chicago: Open Court, Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen. Erster Teil: Die Sprache. Translated as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume One: Language. New Haven: Yale University Press, Zweiter Teil: Das mythische Denken. Volume Two: Mythical Thought. Leipzig: Teubner. Translated as Language and Myth. New York: Harper, Translated as The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Hamburg: Friedrichsen. Dritter Teil: Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis.
Volume Three: The Phenomenology of Knowledge. Bemerkungen zu Martin Heideggers Kantinterpretation. Gram, ed. Kant: Disputed Questions.
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