Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer
Born	(1874-07-28)July 28, 1874 Breslau, Silesia, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland)
Died	April 13, 1945(1945-04-13) (aged 70) New York, United States of America
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Neo-Kantianism

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

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 attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science, but after Cohen's death he used his theory of symbolism to expand the phenomenology of knowledge into a more general 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, he was elected in 1919 to the Philosophy chair 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 taught for a couple of years 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 rejected a job offer from them. 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.

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

Early Works

Cassirer's first major work was a history of modern thought from the Renaissance to Kant, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit [Cassirer 1907]. Its reading of the scientific revolution as the a “Platonic” application of mathematics to nature influenced other historians as E. A. Burtt, E. J. Dijksterhuis, and Alexandre Koyré. Cassirer interprets the development of modern thought as a whole from the perspective of Marburg neo-Kantianism: the idea that philosophy as epistemology (Erkenntniskritik) has philosophy of science as its primary task. His first explicitly philosophical work, Substance and Function (1910), engages with late nineteenth-century developments in the foundations of mathematics and mathematical logic. Stimulated by Einstein's general theory of relativity, in 1921 Cassirer published a book which argued that contemporary science supported a neo-Kantian conception of knowledge. In his review of the book Moritz Schlick disputed this claim.

Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

At Hamburg Cassirer discovered the Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg. Warburg was an art historian with a particular interest in ancient cult, ritual, myth, and magic as sources of archetypal forms of emotional expression. 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, our ability to use symbols creates a universe of symbolic meanings which structure our perception of reality. Cassirer is particularly interested in the symbolic meanings which underlie more sophisticated cultural forms — the ordinary perceptual awareness which is expressed in natural language, and the mythical view of the world. From natural language science develops, and from mythical thought, religion and art develop.

Heidegger Debate

In 1929 Cassirer took part in an historically significant encounter with Martin Heidegger in Davos. Cassirer challenged Heidegger's “finitism” by invoking the universal validity of truths discovered by the exact and moral sciences. Cassirer argues that while Kant's Critique of Pure Reason emphasizes human temporality or finitude, the rest of the Kantian system places human cognition within a much richer conception of humanity.

The Logic of the Cultural Sciences

In "The Logic of the Cultural Sciences" (1942) Cassirer argues that it is possible to achieve objective and universal validity in both the natural and mathematical sciences and the domain of practical, cultural, moral, and aesthetic phenomenon. Although intersubjective objective validity in the natural sciences derives from universal laws of nature, Cassirer asserts that an an analogous type of intersubjective or objective validity arises in the cultural sciences.

Philosophy of the Enlightenment

Cassirer believed that reason's self-realization leads to human liberation. Mazlish (2000) however notes 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 back, with the active encouragement of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, 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)

See also

• Aby Warburg

Further reading

• Barash, Jeffrey Andrew. The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (2008) excerpt and text search
• Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000) excerpt and text search
• Gordon, Peter Eli. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010)
• Krois, John Michael. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (1987)
• Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.). The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (1949)
• Schultz, William. Cassirer & Langer on Myth (2nd ed. 2000) excerpt and text search
• Skidelsky, Edward. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton University Press, 2008) 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13134-4. excerpt and text search

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