One of the most important philosophical topics in the early twentieth century and a topic that was seminal in the emergence of analytic philosophy was the relationship between Kantian philosophy and modern geometry. This paper discusses how this question was tackled by the Neo-Kantian trained philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Surprisingly, Cassirer does not affirm the theses that contemporary philosophers often associate with Kantian philosophy of mathematics. He does not defend the necessary truth of Euclidean geometry but instead develops a kind of (...) logicism modeled on Richard Dedekind's foundations of arithmetic. Further, because he shared with other Neo-Kantians an appreciation of the developmental and historical nature of mathematics, Cassirer developed a philosophical account of the unity and methodology of mathematics over time. With its impressive attention to the detail of contemporary mathematics and its exploration of philosophical questions to which other philosophers paid scant attention, Cassirer's philosophy of mathematics surely deserves a place among the classic works of twentieth century philosophy of mathematics. Though focused on Cassirer's philosophy of geometry, this paper also addresses both Cassirer's general philosophical orientation and his reading of Kant. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to look at Cassirer's relation to critical philosophy from a new perspective. Most discussions concerning Cassirer's Kantianism have so far centered on his relation to neo-Kantianism and the Marburg school. My focus will not be on neo-Kantianism but on Cassirer's notion of a "critique of culture." In an often cited paragraph from the introduction to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer says that his aim is to broaden Kant's critical approach to all various forms (...) of culture, to language as well as myth and art, and thus to transform the "critique of reason" into the "critique of culture." I will explore Cassirer's concept of the "critique of culture" and suggest that it can best be understood by placing it in the context of early twentieth century German philosophy. More precisely, I will aim to show that Cassirer's critique can be seen as an effort to find a middle path between Lebensphilosophie and the positivism of the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

In the paper I try, resolutely, to associate the open ended encyclopedic character of Cassirer's philosophy with the core part of this philosophy concerning symbolic formation. In this way I try to supplement and strengthen the anthropology that Cassirer formulated in AN ESSAY ON MAN. Finally I discuss the historical character and value of this anthropology.

The main goal of the paper is to show that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms may be viewed as a culmination of efforts of those thinkers who at the turn of the 19 th and 20 th century were a part of the so called anti-positivist movement. The paper focuses fore and foremost on those philosophers who in their attempts of grounding and defining Geisteswissenschaften were following the initial idea of Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Cassirer’s symbolical monism is presented as (...) an attempt of identifying that “original need of human mind”, an attempt which ultimately paved way for determining and establishing a distinctively different type of reflection than the one found in natural sciences, despite all the multifariousness of seemingly unreconcilable results arrived at by different thinkers. The author argues that Cassirer’s conception – unlike those found in the works of Droysen, Dilthey, Rickert or Windelband – strives to ground Geisteswissenschaften’s conditions of possibility not on the Kantian concept of determining judgment, but on a concept of reflective judgment, i.e., not on the Kantian concept of the scheme, but on concept of symbol which in turn makes it possible to establish a methodological and symbolic-cultural unity of both natural sciences and humanities. (shrink)

The article investigates Cassirer's developing interest in the cultural sciences to display how his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms constitutes a philosophy of culture. The core concept in such a philosophy of culture is the symbolic formation that both possesses a structured-structuring dimension and appears as an historical process in which culture shows itself as a temporal creation. The philosophy of culture displays 'life in meaning', that is reality as it exhibits human reality manifested in and through the medium of linguistic, (...) artistic, religious, scientific "and so on" action and behaviour. This reality, therefore, is mediation between culture and nature through human spirit. Cassirer's philosophy of culture connects back to Kant's transcendental idealism by emphasizing that any concept of reality establishes itself through a modalization of reality, e.g. that reality constitutes itself in the mode of interpretation. This makes the basis for Cassirer's characteristic understanding of hermeneutics where cultural development is regarded as drama. (shrink)

The ArgumentErnst Cassirer's fundamental conception of symbolism (symbolic pregnance) derives from what may be called a bio-medical model of semiotics, not a linguistic one. He employs both models in his philosophy of symbolic forms, but his notion of the “prototype and model of symbolism” was not derived from linguistics. The sources for his conception of symbolism include the ethnographic and anthropological literature he discovered in Aby Warburg's (1866–1929) Hamburg research library, findings of medical research on aphasia and related conditions, particularly (...) the work of Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965) and the theoretical biology of Jacob von Uexküll (1864–1944). The linguistic model of semiotics regards the bond between the signifier and the signified as purely arbitrary and conventional, but Cassirer traced meaning back to a “natural symbolism” of image-like configurations in bodily feeling and perception. In this way, his doctrine of symbolism assumed a form that undercut the distinction between philosophical Naturalism and Idealism. This helps to explain why in later years Cassirer developed his theory of Basic Phenomena. Cassirer's notion of the “prototype and model of symbolism” illustrates his method of thought, which eschews pure argument in favor of interaction with empirical research. (shrink)