Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was a leading proponent of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer’s discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence—that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of word and image, that it is in and through the symbolic cultural systems of language, art, myth, religion, science, and technology that human life realizes itself and attains not only its form, its visibility, but also its reality. Thought and being are set in opposition and united in genuine correspondence by the symbolic strife between them that Cassirer calls Auseinandersetzung, which determines the ethical relationship of the self to the other.

This book represents a much-needed reappraisal of Germany between the wars, examining the political, social and economic aims of the new republic, their failure and how they led to Nazism and eventually the Second World War. The author includes: * an examination of the legacy of the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles * discussion of the early years of crisis culminating in the Ruhr Invasion and the Dawes Settlement * assessment of the leadership of Stresemann and Bruning * exploration of the circumstances leading to the rise of Hitler * an outline of the historiography of the Weimar Republic.

This edited volume explores the previously underacknowledged 'pre-history' of mathematical structuralism, showing that structuralism has deep roots in the history of modern mathematics. The contributors explore this history along two distinct but interconnected dimensions. First, they reconsider the methodological contributions of major figures in the history of mathematics. Second, they re-examine a range of philosophical reflections from mathematically-inclinded philosophers like Russell, Carnap, and Quine, whose work led to profound conclusions about logical, epistemological, and metaphysic.

"The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is one of the landmarks of twentieth century philosophy. Drawing from the influential work of Wilhelm Dilthey, it transformed neo-Kantianism into a new robust philosophy of culture. The second volume, on Mythical Thinking, analyzes the fundamental layers of perception and expression as well as the articulations with religion and the dialectic with other forms, essentially language and art. The intellectual breadth of the volume is remarkable. It initiated the debate with Martin Heidegger and prompted a long-lasting meditation by Hans Blumenberg. We are only beginning to recognize its importance for our understanding of the power of images in the construction of aesthetics, the self, and the socio-political world. It initiated a discussion within French sociology (Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss) that ultimately resurfaced in Pierre Bourdieu, while today it is considered as a resourceful path for cultural and critical theory (Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth M. Panfilio). Finally, this volume also offers solid grounds for a political critique of Nazism - specifically: Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf - as well as the new emerging totalitarian ideologies." Fabien Capeilleres, Professor of Philosophy, editor of the French edition of Cassirer’s Works. This new translation makes Cassirer’s seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator’s introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

This book is a defense of perspectivism in the age of post-truth. At the crossroads of science, art, and philosophy, it unearths a tradition that we must rediscover: the point of view is not only what divides, it is also what is shared. Today, perspective is associated with individualism and personal viewpoints. But in an age of post-truth, the only robust answer to relativism lies in fact in a reappraisal of perspectivism. In discussion with contemporary new realisms of various sorts, this book makes a case why perspectivism alone can avoid us falling back into epistemological naivetés. A journey into the history of optics, art, philosophy, and social psychology, this book unearths the forgotten tradition of perspectiva communis, which makes perspective the vector of a common horizon. This book argues that vision is never immediate. Rather, to see through is the key to understanding the perspectival operation. We never see by ourselves—all seeing must pass through something other than itself, through the mediation and the detour of an apparatus or the witness of a third party. Besides the theoretical framework for this new approach to perspective, this book presents a series of case studies ranging from innovative interpretations of classical authors and key moments in the history of art—from ancient painting, trompe l’oeil, and Brunelleschi’s experiment in Renaissance Florence—to the issue of perspective in the work of contemporary artists such as Robert Smithson. The Share of Perspective will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, phenomenology, art history, and the history of sciences.

Ernst Cassirer occupies a unique space in twentieth-century philosophy. A great liberal humanist, his multi-faceted work spans the history of philosophy, the philosophy of science, intellectual history, aesthetics, epistemology, the study of language and myth, and more. Cassirer’s thought also anticipates the renewed interest in the origins of analytic and continental philosophy in the Twentieth Century and the divergent paths taken by the 'logicist' and existential traditions, epitomised by his now legendary debate in 1929 with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, over the question "What is the Human Being?" The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is Cassirer's most important work. It was first published in German in 1923, the third and final volume appearing in 1929. In it Cassirer presents a radical new philosophical worldview - at once rich, creative and controversial - of human beings as fundamentally "symbolic animals", placing signs and systems of expression between themselves and the world. This major new translation of all three volumes, the first for over fifty years, brings Cassirer's magnum opus to a new generation of students and scholars. Taken together, the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms are a vital treatise on human beings as symbolic animals and a monumental expression of neo-Kantian thought. Correcting important errors in previous English editions, this translation reflects the contributions of significant advances in Cassirer scholarship over the last twenty to thirty years. Each volume includes a new introduction and translator's notes by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and a thorough index.

Demonstrates how four books by dissident German intellectuals served as a rebuke to the Nazi regime. During 1942, the decisive battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein raged and the Nazi genocide was at its lethal peak. The Pen Confronts the Sword examines the shared motives behind four remarkable texts German exiles began writing that year: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947); Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State (1946); Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946); and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Each identified a specific danger in Nazi ideology and mustered new theories, approaches, and sources to combat it. The books aimed to expose the encompassing catastrophes of German culture (Mann), politics (Cassirer), philology (Auerbach), and philosophy and sociology (Horkheimer and Adorno). Their scope, mastery, and sense of urgency constitute a comprehensive Kulturkampf(culture war) against Nazi barbarism. Avihu Zakai cogently analyzes each work, explains the context of its creation, and draws connections between these four landmark books in Western intellectual history. “This book provides a remarkable synopsis of four well-known, but disparate, responses to Nazism and links them as part of a humanist cultural war with dictatorship. By combining the readings of Mann, Cassirer, Auerbach, and Adorno/Horkheimer, we gain a comprehensive view of an ideal of Western culture composed from very different directions. This approach unlocks a reading of these classics of modern scholarship that is usually lost either in their specific reception by subdisciplines or in their isolated reading as brilliant works.” — Gregory B. Moynahan, author of Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany: 1899–1919