a one time giant of german idealism - cassirer

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Sophia & Phronesis"Knowing Is Not Enough; We Must Apply. Willing Is Not Enough; We Must Do."

- Goethe

Friday, 10 September 2010

One time Giant Of German Idealism

Cassirer was born on July 28, 1874, to a wealthy and cosmopolitan Jewish family, in

he German city of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland). Cassirer entered the University of

Berlin in 1892 After learning of Cohen's writings from Georg Simmel, Cassirer (then

nineteen years old) proceeded to devour them, whereupon he immediately resolved to

tudy with Cohen at Marburg. He studied at Marburg from 1896 to 1899, when he

completed his doctoral work with a dissertation on Descartes's analysis of

mathematical and natural scientific knowledge.

In 1919 Cassirer was offered professorships at two newly founded universities at

Frankfurt and Hamburg under the auspices of the Weimar Republic. He taught at

Hamburg from 1919 until emigrating from Germany in 1933. During these years

Cassirer completed his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In 1929-30 he

erved as the rector of the University, as the first Jew to hold such a position in

Germany. In the Spring of 1929 Cassirer took part in a famous disputation with Martin

Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland, Nevertheless, despite their deep disagreements,

Cassirer and Heidegger enjoyed friendly philosophical relations until Cassirer's

emigration in 1933. After his emigration Cassirer spent two years lecturing at Oxford

and then six years at the University of Gteborg in Sweden. During this time he

developed his most sustained discussion of morality and the philosophy of law as a

tudy of the Swedish legal philosopher Axel Hgerstrm.

Cassirer, like so many German migrs during this period then finally settled in the

United States. He taught at Yale from 1941 to 1944 and at Columbia in 1944-45.

During these years he produced two books in English , where the first, An Essay onMan, serves as a concise introduction to the philosophy of symbolic forms (and thus

Cassirer's distinctive philosophical perspective) as a whole and the second, The Myth

of the State, offers an explanation of the rise of fascism on the basis of Cassirer's

conception of mythical thought.

Died of a heart attack while walking on the streets of New York City on April 13, 1945.

t Hamburg Cassirer found Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg a

remendous resource for the next stage in his philosophical development on the

philosophy of symbolic forms. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms itself appeared, in 1923,1925, and 1929 respectively.The philosophy of symbolic forms is oriented towards the

much more general fact of culture and thus takes the history of human culture as a

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Posted by R. M. Sopmac at 05:01

Labels: philosophy

whole as its ultimate given datum.

Characteristic of the philosophy of symbolic forms is a concern for the more primitive

forms of world-presentation underlying the higher and more sophisticated cultural

forms a concern for the ordinary perceptual awareness of the world expressed

primarily in natural language, and, above all, for the mythical view of the world lying at

the most primitive level of all. For Cassirer, these more primitive manifestations

of symbolic meaning now have an independent status and foundational role that isquite incompatible with both Marburg neo-Kantianism and Kant's original philosophical

conception.

(The Beatiful caricature was drawn by G. J. Southwell)

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