Ernst Cassirer: Difference between revisions

Ernst Cassirer
Ernst Cassirer
	Scientific career
Academic advisors	Hermann Cohen; Paul Natorp
Notable students	Hans Reichenbach; Leo Strauss; Susanne Langer; Nimio de Anquín

Ernst Cassirer
Ernst Cassirer
Born	July 28, 1874; Breslau, Silesia, Prussia; (now Wrocław, Poland)
Died	April 13, 1945 (aged 70); New York, United States of America
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Neo-Kantianism

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Ernst Cassirer (German pronunciation: [kaˈsiːʁəʁ]; July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he followed Hermann Cohen in seeking to supply a philosophy of science, but after Cohen's death he used his theory of symbolism to expand his phenomenology of knowledge into a philosophy of culture. He is one of the leading C20th advocates of philosophical idealism.

Biography

Cassirer was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia, into a Jewish family. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After working for many years as a Privatdozent at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, in 1919 he was elected to a chair of Philosophy at the newly-founded University of Hamburg, where he lectured until 1933, supervising amongst others the doctoral thesis of Leo Strauss. Because he was Jewish, he left Germany when the Nazis came to power.

After leaving Germany he found refuge as a lecturer in Oxford, before becoming a professor at Gothenburg University. When Cassirer considered Sweden too unsafe, he applied for a post at Harvard, but was rejected because thirty years earlier he had turned a job offer from them down. In 1941 he became a visiting professor at Yale University, before moving to Columbia University in New York City, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945. As he had been naturalized in Sweden, he died a Swedish citizen.

His son, Heinz Cassirer, was also a Kantian scholar.

Works

In 1921, stimulated by Einstein's general theory of relativity, Cassirer claimed that contemporary science supported a neo-Kantian conception of knowledge.^[1] In his review of the book Moritz Schlick^[2] disputed this claim. Cassirer then expanded his neo-Kantianism into a general theory of "symbolic forms": aesthetic, ethical, religious, and scientific.

Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

His major work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929) Cassirer argues (as he put it in his more popular 1944 book Essay on Man) that man is a "symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, man creates his own universe of symbolic meaning that structures his perception of reality. For Cassirer, the human world is created through shared linguistic, scientific, and artistic symbolic forms, which greatly extend individual expression and understanding.

Philosophy of the Enlightenment

Cassirer believed that reason's self-realization leads to human liberation. Mazlish (2000) responds however that Cassirer in his The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932) focuses exclusively on ideas, ignoring the political and social context in which they were produced.

The Myth of the State

Cassirer's last work The Myth of the State (1946) was published posthumously. It traces the idea of a totalitarian state back to ideas advanced by thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hegel. He claimed that in the C20th politics there was a return, with the active support of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, back to the irrationality of myth, and in particular to a belief in destiny.

Partial bibliography

Substance and Function (1910), English translation 1923 (at archive.org)
Kant's Life and Thought (1918), English translation 1981
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), English translation 1953–1957
Language and Myth (1925), English translation (1946) by Susanne K. Langer
Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), English translation 1951
The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942), English translation 2000 by S.G. Lofts (previously translated in 1961 as The Logic of the Humanities)
An Essay on Man (written and published in English) (1944)
The Myth of the State (written and published in English) (posthumous) (1946)
The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel (1950) online edition
Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945 ed. by Donald Phillip Verene (1981)

Notes

^ Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie. Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer. Translated as Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Chicago: Open Court, 1923.
^ Schlick, M. (1921) "Kritizistische oder empiristische Deutung der neuen Physik?" Kant-Studien, 26: 96-111. Translated as "Critical or Empiricist Interpretation of Modern Physics?".

External links

Michael Friedman. "Ernst Cassirer". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
History of the Cassirer family
Centre for Intercultural Studies
Information Philosopher on Ernst Cassirer on Free Will

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[1] Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie. Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer. Translated as Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Chicago: Open Court, 1923.

[2] Schlick, M. (1921) "Kritizistische oder empiristische Deutung der neuen Physik?" Kant-Studien, 26: 96-111. Translated as "Critical or Empiricist Interpretation of Modern Physics?".

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-'''Ernst Cassirer''' ({{IPA-de|kaˈsiːʁəʁ}}; July 28, 1874 &ndash; April 13, 1945) was a [[Germans|German]] [[philosopher]]. Working in the [[Neo-Kantian]] Marburg tradition, he followed [[Herman Cohen]] in seeking to supply a philosophy of science, but after Cohen's death he used a theory of symbols to expand his [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|phenomenology]] of [[epistemology|knowledge]] into a philosophy of culture. He is one of the leading C20th advocates of philosophical [[idealism]].
+'''Ernst Cassirer''' ({{IPA-de|kaˈsiːʁəʁ}}; July 28, 1874 &ndash; April 13, 1945) was a [[Germans|German]] [[philosopher]]. Trained within the [[Neo-Kantian]] [[Marburg School]], he followed [[Hermann Cohen]] in seeking to supply a philosophy of science, but after Cohen's death he used his theory of symbolism to expand his [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|phenomenology]] of [[epistemology|knowledge]] into a philosophy of culture. He is one of the leading C20th advocates of philosophical [[idealism]].
 == Biography ==