This essay centralizes and explores Ernst Cassirer’s concept of style. Although it does not emerge as much as the concept of form or symbol in Cassirer’s corpus, style plays a major—if intrinsic—role throughout the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. I shall examine how Cassirer’s conception of style is derived from Goethe’s theory of art and why it is fundamental to Cassirer’s theory of knowledge. Style is considered the defining feature of the cultural sciences, as well as the sign of the anthropological (...) character of the natural sciences, and, more generally, as the creative principle underlying all objectivity. I argue that it is therefore justified to read style as the fundamental yet variable expression of our symbolic relation to reality. Indeed, style refers neither to an abstract principle nor to a predetermined truth: it is a formative force actualizing itself in the incessant diversification of its forms. In so doing, Cassirer’s underexamined concept of style proves highly relevant in our times of epistemic and cultural pluralism. (shrink)

What is history about? This Element shows that answers centred on the keyword 'past events' are incomplete, even if they are not simply wrong. Interweaving theoretical and historical perspectives, it provides an abstract overview of the thematic plurality that characterizes contemporary academic historiography. The reflection on different sorts of pasts that can be at focus in historical research and writing encompasses events as well as non-events, especially recursive social structures and cultural webs. Some consequences of such plurality for discussions concerning (...) historical methodology, explanation, exemplification, and representation are also outlined. The basic message, reinforced throughout, is that the great relevance of non-event-centred approaches should prompt us to talk more about “histories” in the plural and less about “history” in the singular. (shrink)

The article compares Fritz Kaufmann and Ernst Cassirer’s conceptions of aesthetics, focusing in particular on their characterisation of the experience of apprehension of art objects. Firstly, analysing Kaufmann’s early investigation of the experience of the reception of art images and Cassirer’s observations on art as a symbolic form, it argues that the two philosophers conceptualise the reception of art objects in a similar way, as an experience structured across different layers of meaning constitution that are based on specific functions of (...) consciousness. While these similarities seem to suggest a convergence between Kaufmann’s early phenomenological reflections and Cassirer’s revised Marburg Neo-Kantianism, an account of Kaufmann’s direct confrontation with Cassirer shows that there remain profound differences regarding their final understanding of the aims of their philosophical inquiries as well as of the epistemological premises of their approaches. These differences become clearer in Kaufmann’s later reflections where he articulates the implications of his interpretation of transcendental phenomenology, stressing in particular the role of eidetic reduction. (shrink)

With reference to Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (PoM) in my paper I will address three points, namely: To what extent Schelling’s PoM provides us with arguments in favour of 1. Realism, 2. Emergentism and 3. Documentality (Ferraris 2009). Accordingly, in the first section, Reality, I will present Schelling’s PoM as realism, arguing that in mythology Schelling finds the traces of the developing of consciousness, regarded as a real fact. But, as this latter can only be real if having a history, (...) i.e. if emerging from a previous natural status, which is devoid of any consciousness, PoM should be regarded as strongly related with a sort of emergentism. This will thus be the object of the second section, where I will investigate the genetic interpretation of Schelling’s Weltalter proposed by Wolfram Hogrebe (Hogrebe 1989) and suggest that precisely this analysis of the Weltalter explains also why Schelling’s project couldn’t but fail. In fact, against its intention, the Weltalter, as it was trying to explain the rise of semantics together with it the true genesis of the our acknowledgment of the world, still remains affected by an idealistic stance and hence couldn’t succeed in becoming positive philosophy. Eventually, in the third section of this paper, Documentality, I argue, that a solution of the problems left open by Schelling’s Weltalter and positively addressed in the PoM is offered by the interpretation of this latter as a contribution to Documentality. Even if created before and apparently independently from the act writing, in fact mythology relies on the possibility of recording tales, hence it is made of and eventually ends up in a written corpus. This means that the consciousness mythology gives us an account of, is the one that for the first time is able to present itself in narrated tales. It is not the mere possibility of acknowledging something, but in fact the possibility of binding our will to a freely formulated law trough our memory, i.e. the birth of conscience upon consciousness, which is the real sense of religion. In this sense Ferraris’ concept of documentality provides us an important theoretical framework to understand the hidden presuppositions of Schelling’s PoM and to relate this latter to its realistic and emergentistic character. (shrink)

This paper aims at focusing on Cassirer's relationship with Hegel during the crucial period when Cassirer is outlining and completing the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in the early 1920s. The main thesis is that Cassirer has never abandoned his original Neo-Kantian approach, despite the fact that it has been enriched within the perspective of a philosophy of culture indebted to some extent also to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. However, Cassirer maintains that Kant's critical idealism must be contrasted with Hegel's absolute (...) idealism, keeping thereby open the process of the spirit that cannot close itself in a definitive logical structure. This critical stance is shared by some contemporaries of Cassirer such as Dilthey, Windelband, and above all Natorp. We have thus to read Cassirer's project against the historical backdrop of the ‘Hegel-Renaissance’ in Germany, a circumstance that, according to the author, can contribute to a more adequate understanding of Cassirer's opus magnum. (shrink)

1. Samantha Matherne’s book Cassirer is, other than its publication in the series Routledge Philosophers might suggest, not simply an introductory volume. It is perhaps the best overall account of...

Between 1906 and 1909, the Austrian-born German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald undertook an expedition to Germany's Pacific colonies on behalf of the Berlin Museum for Ethnology. There he carried out a series of experimental psychological tests to investigate the mentalities and intelligence of Melanesian subjects. Due to the limitations on verbal communication, Thurnwald privileged non-verbal experiments, especially involving drawings made by his local assistants and guides. His 1913 publication Ethnopsychological Studies on South Seas Peoples reproduces some 200 of those images, which (...) have seldom been studied since. This article examines Thurnwald's experiments in ethnopsychology through the lens of these visual materials and situates his project within larger international trends of scientific colonialism. Despite purporting to further native welfare, his application of experimental psychology to the colonial field was meant to provide solutions to the administration's most urgent problems: pacification, labour recruitment, and a declining birth rate. Yet, as this article argues, the images he collected can also be read against the grain as documents of indigenous response to German colonial rule. (shrink)

1. Samatha Matherne’s reading of Ernst Cassirer’s complex and multifaceted oeuvre demonstrates a remarkably strong systematic grasp.1 By identifying the themes, ideas, and working concepts that are...

Dewey’s concept of “experience” has baffled many a reader. It is, however, assuredly the key to Dewey’s distinctive philosophical contribution. Notoriously, Rorty urges that Dewey would have been well-advised to abandon “experience: in favor of “discourse” (that is, the “linguistic method of philosophy”), which he draws largely from Davidson and Sellars. For various reasons, Rorty betrays his deep misunderstanding of Dewey’s pragmatism, the lack of any close relationship between Sellars’s notion of the “given” (as a philosophical target) and Dewey’s notion (...) of the saving discovery of what is “denoted” (in inquiry) as the “given”; and the extremely problematic (possibly even incoherent) treatment of linguistic meaning in Davidson’s most pertinent papers (which Rorty seems to regard as pragmatist in an important sense and is guided by). In any event, neither Davidson nor Rorty can be rightly supposed to extend or improve Deweyan pragmatism: Rorty, in fact, explicitly and unconditionally repudiates the “linguistic turn”; and Davidson finally subverts the very theory of language on which any reading of Rorty’s “pragmatist” account of Davidson’s theory of meaning would be at all feasible. The exposé of these disorders may contributes to a more careful formulation of the pragmatist undertaking, which lies elsewhere and depends on a measure of convergence between Dewey and Peirce. (shrink)

The article examines Randall Collins's magnum opus, The Sociology of Philosphies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change in relation to a number of discourses bearing on the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of philosophies, from Hegel and 19th-century historicism to Mannheim, Foucault, Bourdieu and Gillian Rose's Hegel Contra Sociology. The article explicates Collins's dual theory of intellectual networks and institutional conflict as factors in the explanation of intellectual change. The article interprets Collins's work as a classic application of Durkheimian (...) sociological principles to the analysis of knowledge. However, the article argues that Collins is less successful in accounting for the internal normative motives of inquiry and the problem of what Hegel saw as the claims of reason in history based on the orientation to truth. (shrink)

In the 1920s, Cassirer had the good fortune of participating in the intellectual community that gathered around the Warburg Library in Hamburg. 1This “dreamland of humanists” had a profound impact...