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)

The founding fathers of modern philosophy of culture, the neo-Kantians, and especially the Southwest school, brought the concept of culture into play as a counter concept to that of nature. Taking Heinrich Rickert?s conception of culture as a starting point, the article shows how culture is conceived of as a self-formation of the subject. It leads to transcendental idealism of freedom, typical of a Kantian type of transcendental philosophy. However, in this self and world formation of the subject it is (...) presupposed that nature is to any extent formable by values and thus by freedom. This presupposition cannot be accounted for properly within transcendental idealism. Hegel, by contrast, conceives of culture as a manifestation of the idea, leading to speculative idealism of freedom. The origin of culture, i.e., its original determinacy, should not be conceived of in terms of an opposition to nature, and consequently in the fashion of a subject of thought and action that forms itself by forming its world, culture. Rather, it should be conceived of in terms of a manifestation of the idea as the truly transcendental subject qua absolute ground of validity and thus the ground of being too. Nature and culture are both primarily determined by their ideal character and the relationships emerging therefrom. (shrink)

Scholars who are members of a generation descending from a founder of a philosophical school might be titled as “children.” Those members are characterized as scholars who continue the doctrines of the founder into the future. In the history of ideas there are many examples for such scholarly lineages. Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy was less suitable for generating a successorship in the sense of a filiation: That became dramatically obvious at the famous debate between Martin Heidegger and himself in Davos. Heidegger (...) seemed to be the philosopher of the future by developing a “new essentialism” which shall be expounded as the core-message of his doctrine; this is elaborated in the first chapter of this essay. Only in the post-war generations and long time after Cassirer’s death, eminent scholars working in different scientific disciplines and in different countries based their public research – more or less explicitly – on Cassirer’s philosophy of culture. The second section will discuss three famous examples: Nelson Goodman’s Semiology, Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Symbolic Forms and lastly the Political Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

No presente artigo serão discutidas algumas abordagens e explicações comparativas dedicadas à moderna teoria da linguagem, que podem ser encontradas tanto no filósofo neokantiano do símbolo Ernst Cassirer como nos linguistas estruturalistas Nikolaj Trubetzkoj e Roman Jakobson, que frequentemente se referem a Ferdinand de Saussure. Com esta finalidade, recorreremos a conceitualizações inovadoras usadas em comum no pensamento filosófico da primeira metade do século XX, tais como forma, estrutura, sistema, sinal, sentido ou significação e expressão, que determinam as respectivas teorias da (...) linguagem. Entre outras coisas, as evidências provam que certos novos princípios de pensamento e terminologias são avanços em diferentes disciplinas científicas e meios culturais, sem que seus descobridores ou representantes se refiram uns aos outros, ou mesmo que conheçam uns aos outros. (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...

Cassirer’s thought took a radical turn in his mature life, comparable to the one that Kant went through in his last days, and in both cases this was motivated by the political events that they witnessed: the French Revolution in Kant’s case, and the National Socialist ideology in Cassirer’s case. In this work I canvass Cassirer’s way of articulating his own political thought by constantly reclaiming the philosophy of Kant, whose work he never stops referring to, and by constantly reclaiming (...) the values defended by the Enlightenment’s project as a whole, in order to defend, among other things, the idea of a republican constitution and thereby the Weimar Republic. Cassirer decided to fight against Nazism in the field of History of Ideas, choosing Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe as his allies. The second part of this work emphasizes this parallelism by unfolding the premises of Kant’s republicanism. (shrink)

We trace here the layout of Cassirer’s intellectual itinerary, highlightning the growing political commitment in his thought as he faces the national socialist ideology from the vantage point of history of ideas and his philosophy of the symbolic forms, invoking in this sense the spirit of Enlightenment in general and Kant in a very particular way as well. Cassirer’s ideological rebuttal of Nazism begins in 1928 with his hommage to the Weimar Republic and reaches up to 1945 with The Myth (...) of State. Here however it is presented an interpretation of the dangerously moral meaning that Judaism had for the totalitarian ideology of National Socialism. (shrink)