Description
Book SynopsisIn his Phenomenology of Cognition, Cassirer provides a comprehensive and systematic account of the dynamic process involved in the whole of human culture as it progresses from the world of myth and its feeling of social belonging to the highest abstractions of mathematics, logic and theoretical physics. Cassirer engages with the most sophisticated and cutting-edge work in fields ranging from ethnology to classics, egyptology and assyriology to ethology, brain science and psychology to logic, mathematics and theoretical physics. His command of philosophy, literature, and the arts is superb.
Echoing his work on Kant, Cassirer begins The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with the problem posed by the meaning of being for philosophy since Plato. But Cassirer also shows that this problem gains new significance with Kant and with the development of modern culture. Cassirer weaves his conception of the development of knowledge into a broadly Kantian and German idea
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'The three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms focus on language, myth, and science respectively, offering fascinating, if necessarily fragmentary and speculative, accounts of how each develops in the direction of increasing freedom and universality… the basic insight of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is one that continues to inform the humanities today. The categories we use to understand the world aren’t a passive reflection of the way things really are; rather, we actively create systems of meaning that evolve over time.' - Adam Kirsch, New York Review of Books
Table of ContentsForeword Peter E. Gordon Translator’s Preface Steve G. Lofts Translator’s Introduction: A Phenomenology of Symbolic Creative Cognition: the Unfolding of the Symbolic Function and the Construction of a Pure Theory of the Symbolic Steve G. Lofts Translator’s Acknowledgements Steve G. Lofts. Preface Introduction Part 1: The Expressive Function and the World of Expression 1. Subjective and Objective Analysis 2. The Expressive Phenomenon as the Basic Element of Perceptual Consciousness 3. The Expressive Function and the Mind-Body-Problem [Leib-Seelen-Problem] Part 2: The Problem of Representation [Repräsentation] and the Construction of the Intuitive World 1. The Concept and the Problem of Representation [Repräsentation] 2. Thing and Property 3. Space 4. The Intuition of Time 5. Symbolic Pregnance 6. On the Pathology of Symbolic Consciousness Part 3: The Function of Signification and the Construction of Scientific Cognition 1. Toward a Theory of the Concept 2. Concept and Object 3. Language and Science: Thing Signs and Ordinal Signs 4. The Object of Mathematics 5. The Foundations of Natural-Scientific Cognition Appendix: "'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy" (1930). Glossary of German Terms Index
