DOCSLIB.ORG

Symbolic Construction of Reality

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Symbolic Construction of Reality the symbolic construction of reality the symbolic construction of reality Th e Legacy of Ernst Cassirer edited by jeffrey andrew barash the university of chicago press • Chicago and London jeffrey andrew barash is the Professeur des Universités in the Depart- ment of Philosophy at the Université de Picardie in Amiens, France, and the author of several books, including Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. Th e University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Th e University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2008 by Th e University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-03686-1 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-03686-3 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Th e symbolic construction of reality : the legacy of Ernst Cassirer / edited by Jeff rey Andrew Barash. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-03686-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-03686-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Cassirer, Ernst, 1874–1945—Congresses. I. Barash, Jeff rey Andrew. b3216.c34s95 2008 193—dc22 2008024437 ∞ Th e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. contents acknowledgments vii introduction ix Part One foundations: articulations of the symbol . Symbol and History Ernst Cassirer’s Critique of the Philosophy of History 3 enno rudolph . Ernst Cassirer on Nicholas of Cusa Between Conjectural Knowledge and Religious Pluralism 17 yossef schwartz . History and Philosophy in Ernst Cassirer’s System of Symbolic Forms 40 fabien capeillères . Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms A Foundational Reading 73 gabriel motzkin Part Two themes: symbolic forms and philosophy . Cassirer’s Metaphysics 93 donald phillip verene . Th e Limits of Order Cassirer and Heidegger on Finitude and Infi nity 104 michael roubach . Ernst Cassirer’s Th eory of Myth On the Ethico-Political Dimension of His Debate with Martin Heidegger 114 jeffrey andrew barash Part Th ree ramifications: symbol, history, politics . Th e Myth of the State Revisited Ernst Cassirer and Modern Political Th eory 135 joseph mali . Cassirer’s Enlightenment and Its Recent Critics Is Reason Out of Season? 163 fania oz-salzberger . Practicing “Intertextuality” Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen on Myth and Monotheism 174 almut shulamit bruckstein . Th e Hero of Enlightenment 189 gideon freudenthal list of contributors 215 index 219 acknowledgments Th e articles published in this volume were presented in preliminary form at the conference “Ernst Cassirer: Symbol, Science, and Culture” held in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in May 1998. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History of Th e Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas of Tel Aviv University and to the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute for having sponsored this conference. Special thanks to the organizers of the confer- ence, Professors Gideon Freudenthal, Joseph Mali, and Gabriel Motzkin and to Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr, who served as director of the Rosen- zweig Center during the period of preparation of this volume. I also wish to thank Dr. Anya Mali, whose literary talents and editorial suggestions contributed to the coherence and clarity of the articles included in this work. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Corinna Kaiser of the Rosenzweig Center for her editorial suggestions and for her help in preparing the manuscript for publication. I completed work on this volume during a semester in residence in the Philosophy Department of the University of Hamburg, which has recently created an Ernst-Cassirer Visiting Professorship in honor of the Hamburg philosopher. I extend my gratitude to my colleagues at the Uni- versity of Hamburg and particularly to Professors Dorothea Frede and Birgit Recki for their encouragement during the months when this book was brought to completion. Jeff rey Andrew Barash introduction Th e eleven essays included in this volume examine the legacy of Ernst Cas- sirer’s thought and reassess its signifi cance for our contemporary world. In focusing on diff erent aspects of Cassirer’s wide-ranging work, in fi elds such as philosophy and history, cultural studies, ethics and politics, these essays seek less to impose unity and order on writings elaborated over the course of fi ve decades, than to explore and interpret diff erent facets of his work in its diversity. Presented sixty years after Cassirer’s death in 1945, this volume does not intend to serve as an apology for his orientation; the studies that comprise it refl ect a willingness to consider the criticism his work has generated, both among contemporaries and members of later generations. In keeping with this attempt to present a balanced approach to Cassirer’s writings, the following introductory essay will consider the contribution made by his theory of symbolic forms in light of important criticism it has elicited. cassirer’s theory of the symbol Th e title of this collection of essays indicates a primary concern of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy, namely the role for human understanding of the symbol in the constitution of reality. Cassirer’s characterization of the symbol as “symbolic form,” however, employs this term in a way which is neither usual nor universally accepted. Encompassing the primary sym- bolic form of language, as well as other cultural articulations such as art, myth, religion, and science, Cassirer’s unusually broad defi nition of the symbol sharply contrasts with a narrower traditional usage in philosophy, where the symbol is said to mean something other than what it directly x introduction represents, something that cannot directly correspond to its sensuous im- age. In view of the reception of Cassirer’s philosophy, it is clear that this broad connotation he conferred on the symbol is surrounded by a certain paradox. Cassirer’s philosophy, indeed, has generally been associated with Kantian idealism and with the neo-Kantian movement, with which he admittedly shared certain affi nities. Th ere are, however, key diff erences, and Cassirer’s broad defi nition of the symbol manifests the dissonance between his thought and Kant’s philosophy, as well as its distinctiveness in relation to more typical expressions of the neo-Kantian orientation. Indeed, one must ask whether the marked tendency to refer to Cassirer as just “another of those neo-Kantians,” has not paradoxically obscured what is most original in his thinking. Th is originality, as I will argue, comes to light above all in the unusual character of Cassirer’s interpreta- tion of the symbol as symbolic form. Born in 1874 in Breslau, which at the time was part of Germany, Cas- sirer completed his doctoral dissertation in Marburg under the direction of Hermann Cohen, one of the leading fi gures in the German neo-Kantian movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cassirer’s work manifests the inspiration of the neo-Kantian perspective, which constituted a main orientation of German intellectual life in the period extending roughly from the second half of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War. Th is orientation corresponded to a new philosophical direction, which strongly appealed to Cassirer, namely, the revival of the critical attitude espoused by Kant following the mid- nineteenth-century decline of German speculative idealism, and the con- comitant rise of philosophical interest in the empirically oriented natural and human sciences. Cassirer, however, belonged to a later generation of philosophers sympathetic to the neo-Kantian perspective whose major work was elaborated in the years following the First World War, during a period when neo-Kantianism came increasingly under attack in the Ger- man universities. In the years following the Great War the orientations of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger or Karl Jaspers were particularly representative of a new climate in German academia, associated with the call to recast the theoretical and scientifi c preoccupations typical of neo- Kantianism in terms of a philosophy of existence. In this climate, the fact that Cassirer had been pinned with the neo-Kantian label helps account for the controversy which has surrounded the reception of his thought and which has all too often led to neglect of his ideas on their own merits. introduction xi Th is neglect was, of course, abetted by Martin Heidegger’s polemical attitude toward Cassirer in the 1920s, expressed in Heidegger’s course lec- tures, in a critical 1925 review of Mythical Th ought (the second volume of Cassirer’s major work, Th e Philosophy of Symbolic Forms), in his book Sein und Zeit, and in the celebrated Davos conference of 1929, which brought Cassirer and Heidegger face to face in a debate on the theme of Kan- tianism and Philosophy. In these utterances Heidegger insisted that the neo-Kantian roots of Cassirer’s thought accounted for what—in his view—was Cassirer’s inadequate approach to the fundamental themes of human existence. Heidegger’s lack of appreciation for the originality of Cassirer’s work is perhaps not surprising if one remembers that the concept of the symbol— so central to Cassirer’s philosophy—was of little interest to Heidegger. In Heidegger’s major work of the period, Sein und Zeit (1927), he deals with the signifi cance of “sign” (Zeichen) and “reference” (Verweisung), but symbols and symbolic interaction are hardly prominent themes in this or in his other works. Most important, Heidegger’s book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), which fueled his debate with Cassirer at Davos, focused on Kant’s interpretation of the transcendental schema- tism by which the pure imagination lends structure to sensuous intu- ition, while Heidegger accorded little attention to that other means of conferring meaning on sensuous intuition—namely, comprehension by analogy—on the basis of which Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, had defi ned the symbol.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Machiavelli's Background
    chapter 1 Machiavelli’s Background 1.1 Machiavellism Sedulo curavi, humanas actiones non ridere, non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere. baruch de spinoza, Tractatus Politicus i.4. Perhaps in a larger degree than any other political author in the last five hun- dred years, Machiavelli has been subject to a vast number of interpretations. So much has been written that in his book The Myth of the State, published posthumously in 1946, Ernst Cassirer struggled to trace the turbulent historiog- raphy of the Florentine author. In his study, Cassirer reminded us of how Machiavelli’s fortune has moved like a pendulum from one end of the interpre- tative spectrum to the other.1 His writings have suffered all kinds of vicissitudes – from periods of severe condemnation, which began almost immediately after his writings were published, to eras of veneration. There is no denial that what readers have understood as “Machiavellism” has taken a great variety of forms over the years. The first period of censure was initiated in France and continued in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 It began after the 1 Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 116. For a more updated historiographical study see, Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli;” Giuliano Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna (Rome: Laterza, 1995) and Davide De Camilli, Machiavelli nel tempo: la crit- ica machiavelliana dal cinquecento a oggi (Pisa: Edizioni ets, 2000). 2 For more on the reception of Machiavelli’s writings see, Sidney Anglo, Machiavelli: The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Brian Richardson, “The Prince and its early Italian readers” in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 E-Mail: [email protected]
    CURRICULUM VITAE October 2013 Dr. Francesca Biagioli (Milano, June 15, 1983) Institution: New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest Address: Str. Plantelor 21, 203971 Bucharest, Romania Telephone: (+4) 0213079910 Fax: (+4) 0213270774 E-Mail: [email protected] Areas of Specialization Early theories of measurement, Kant, Neo-Kantianism, Philosophy of geometry in the nineteenth century Areas of Competence History of logic and methodology, History of philosophy of science, Logical positivism, Phenomenology, Post-Kantian philosophy of knowledge Education 2012 PhD in Philosophy at the University of Turin, Italy. Dissertation: Spazio, numero e geometria: La sfida di Helmholtz e il neokantismo di Marburgo [Space, Number, and Geometry: Helmholtz’s Challenge and the Marburg Neo-Kantianism]. Supervisor: Prof. Massimo Ferrari 2009-2011 Doctoral grant at the University of Turin 2008 MA in Philosophy at the University of Milan, Italy (laurea summa cum laude). Dissertation: “Logica formale e logica trascendentale nelle ricerche del neokantismo” [Formal and Transcendental Logic in Neo-Kantianism]. Supervisor: Prof. Renato Pettoello 2006-2007 ERASMUS student at the University of Marburg, Germany 2005 BA in Philosophy at the University of Milan (laurea summa cum laude). Dissertation: “La riflessione sull’illuminismo nella Dialettica dell’illuminismo di Max Horkheimer e Theodor W. Adorno e ne La filosofia dell’illuminismo di Ernst Cassirer” [Reflexions on Enlightenment in the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer
    [Show full text]
  • Epistemology1 Niels Wildschut
    This is the penultimate draft of an article that is published in Martin Kusch, Katherina Kinzel, Johannes Steizinger, Niels Wildschut (eds.): The Emergence of Relativism: German Thought from the Enlightenment to National Socialism Epistemology1 Niels Wildschut From the moment Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) declared that “nature” was nothing but the whole of experience, and that any enquiry into nature first required a critical assessment of the necessary preconditions and limitations of experience, many philosophers began to see it as their central task to provide the sciences with their epistemological foundations. In the nineteenth century, however, the Kantian self-understanding of the philosopher was also challenged from various sides. For example, the institutionalization of history as a scientific discipline raised the question: How can the philosopher’s methodologies of critique and of transcendental deduction be reconciled with the insight that all of life on earth, including the philosopher’s own standpoint, is thoroughly historical? Furthermore, various natural sciences posed their own challenges to philosophy, for example by uncovering the psycho-physiological processes within human cognition, and by stressing the very earthly and material nature of the soul (and thus presumably also of the “transcendental subject”). From within Kant’s transcendental philosophy, many of these challenges seemed easy to block. Within the scientific community as well as the general (and rapidly expanding) reading public, however, these Kantian defenses
    [Show full text]
  • Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: the Making of a Political Philosopher
    AJS Review http://journals.cambridge.org/AJS Additional services for AJS Review: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Eugene Sheppard. Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006. 188 pp. Michael Zank AJS Review / Volume 32 / Issue 02 / November 2008, pp 437 - 441 DOI: 10.1017/S0364009408001372, Published online: 10 November 2008 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0364009408001372 How to cite this article: Michael Zank (2008). AJS Review, 32, pp 437-441 doi:10.1017/ S0364009408001372 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/AJS, IP address: 129.64.99.140 on 14 Jul 2015 Book Reviews who now teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin, has been instrumental in calling back to life the ideas of a philosopher that for many years were considered virtually defunct. There were, of course, occasional glimpses of Cassirer’s spirit in the English-speaking world: Suzanne Langer’s 1942 Philosophy in a New Key, and Nelson Goodman’s 1978 Ways of Worldmaking (the first chapter of which Goodman read at the University of Hamburg on the occasion of Cassirer’s hun- dredth birthday). These cases aside, serious scholarship on Cassirer in the English-speaking world has been rare indeed. Why this is so deserves some reflection. Perhaps it is attributable to the fact that what counts as “continental philosophy” on this continent continues to draw much of its inspiration from the works of émigré intellectuals whose primary focus was pol- itical and social thought (Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, etc.), while Cassirer’s thoughts on politics were comparatively uninspired.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 This Is the Penultimate Draft of a Paper That Is Forthcoming in Herder
    This is the penultimate draft of a paper that is forthcoming in Herder Yearbook XIV NIELS WILDSCHUT (Vienna) Proteus and the Pyrrhonists. Historical Change and Continuity in Herder’s Early Philosophy of History1 In seinen frühen Arbeiten setzt Herder regelmäßig die Proteusfigur ein, um die geschichtlichen Verwandlungen des Menschen und der Produkte des menschlichen Geistes zu schildern. Die Figur scheint zunächst in eine skeptische oder auch relativistische Richtung zu weisen (und wurde in Interpretationen von Herders Frühwerk oft so gedeutet). Eine textnahe Lektüre der Herderschen Verwendung der Figur und eine Analyse seiner Anknüpfungen an die Rezeptionsgeschichte des Proteus-Mythos ergeben aber ein anderes Bild. Sich auf Nebenbedeutungen der Proteusfigur wie die ‚Urmaterie‘ und die ‚Divination‘ stützend, verweist Herder gerade mit dieser Figur auf die Einheit in der Vielheit. In dieser Arbeit werden, nach einer kurzen historischen Darstellung der verschiedenen Deutungen der Proteusfigur, drei Methoden identifiziert und analysiert, die Herder anwendet, um anhand von Proteus die Einheit in der Vielheit einsichtig zu machen. Erstens geht es um den Versuch, anhand von Analogien die Verbindung aller historischen Gestalten der Menschheit aufzudecken. Zweitens wird erklärt, wie Herder durch die genetische Erklärung der Ursachen der historischen Verwandlung von menschlichen Sprachen und Kulturformen sich ihrer gegenwärtigen Form verstehend annähert. Drittens spielt Proteus eine wichtige Rolle in Herders Verständnis der Endlichkeit und Plastizität der menschlichen Natur sowie ihrer providentiellen Bildung durch die ganze Weltgeschichte hindurch. Gemeinsam ist den drei Strategien, dass Herder stets eine doppelte Polemik, sowohl gegen den Pyrrhonismus als auch gegen den Ethnozentrismus, führt. Die Hauptthese dieser Arbeit lautet, dass Proteus für Herder eine geeignete Denkfigur darstellt, um die Fehler beider Positionen zu vermeiden.
    [Show full text]
  • Johann Gottfried Herder on Memory Laura Follesa Friedrich Schiller University of Jena
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by CommonKnowledge Essays in Philosophy ISSN 1526-0569 | Essays in Philosophy is published by the Pacific University Libraries Volume 19, Issue 2 (2018) Learning and Vision: Johann Gottfried Herder on Memory Laura Follesa Friedrich Schiller University of Jena Abstract A consistent thread throughout Johann Gottfried Herder’s thought is his interest in human knowledge and in its origins. Although he never formulated a systematic theory of knowledge, elements of one are disseminated in his writings, from the early manuscript Plato sagte (1766–68) to one of his last works, the periodical Adrastea (1801–3). Herder assigned a very special function to memory and to the related idea of a recollection of “images,” as they play a pivotal role in the formation of personal identity. He provided an original description of the Platonic theory of recollection, trying to merge ancient and modern meta- physical views and to interpret them from a less metaphysical and more psychological point of view. I then analyze Herder’s notion of memory via another research line, which is basically founded upon the analogy between the childhood of an individual and the infancy of the human race. Finally, I explore Herder’s view that memory and imagination, as “forces” of the soul, can have negative effects on an individual when they are not equally balanced. Essays Philos (2018)19:2 | DOI: 10.7710/1526-0569.1610 Correspondence: [email protected] © 2018 Follesa. This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Essays in Philosophy Volume 19, Issue 2 1.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cultural Function of Monotheism on Cassirer’S Late Political Philosophy
    Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift. Årg. 87 (2011) The Cultural Function of Monotheism On Cassirer’s Late Political Philosophy CHRISTIAN POLKE Dr. Theol. Christian Polke is a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant of Systematic Theology (Ethics and Philosophy of Religion) at the Department of Protestant Theology, University of Hamburg. In 2009-10 he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in Uppsala. His doctoral dissertation was published in 2009 under the title: ÖFFENTLICHE RE- LIGION IN DER DEMOKRATIE: Eine Untersuchung zur weltanschaulichen Neutralität des Staates. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt (Religious Neutrali- ty of the Modern State. A Study in Political Ethics). In memoriam central questions of moral philosophy. For ex- John Michael Krois ample, he subjects Hägerström’s moral emoti- (1943-2010) vism to radical criticism by insisting on the ne- cessity of an universalist perspective in ethics.4 Ernst Cassirer`s philosophy of symbolic forms Otherwise, he argues, one cannot overcome the does not deal with issues of law and morals as stage of particularistic customs. Just how unjus- extensively as with myth, language or religion.1,2 tified the accusation of a disinterest in questions However, one notable exception is his study of of social and moral philosophy is, also becomes Axel Hägerström, one of the most important obvious in Cassirer’s inaugural lecture at the Swedish philosophers of the first half of the 20th University of Gothenburg. Here, the philosopher century. This work, which
    [Show full text]
  • Diminished Expectations
    Cassirer 1 Diminished Expectations Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos and the Present State of Philosophy Conference at the occasion of the annual meeting of the American Friends of Marbach 2015, May 9, Yale University 1 Last May the Friends of the Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach organized a symposium at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library. That Cassirer should have been the focus was to be expected, given that the Beinecke is the custodian of the Cassirer archive. And to be expected also was that Heidegger should have become a secondary focus, given that the Literatur Archiv in Marbach is the custodian of the Heidegger archive. The constellation of these two names, Cassirer and Heidegger, at that time and in this place, filled me with both sadness and with nostalgia. It is of course impossible not to think of the historical context, especially of the year 1933, which caused Heidegger to join the Nazi party and to assume the rectorship of the university of Freiburg, while Cassirer, who had served as rector of the university of Hamburg with such distinction, was forced to leave Germany, never to return. In this connection it is also difficult not to think back to the much discussed Davos Disputation in the spring of 1929, where much more than two profoundly different philosophical positions collided, and especially the younger generation was on the whole — was it altogether misguided? — more impressed by Heidegger than by Cassirer. I am struck by how seriously philosophy was then being taken! It was hoped that it could cast some light into a world shadowed by the disaster that was World War One.
    [Show full text]
  • The Rehabilitation of Myth: Enlightenment and Romanticism in Johann Gottfried Herder's Vom Geist Der Ebräischen Poesie
    The Rehabilitation of Myth: Enlightenment and Liisa Steinby Romanticism in Johann Gottfried Herder’s Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie Johann Gottfried Herder is commonly recognised as a predecessor or even an initiator of German Romanticism. The recent research on Herder since the 1980s has con- firmed this view and proven his influence to have been even far greater than acknowl- edged by the Romantic philosophers and writers themselves or by earlier research on them; moreover, his influence is not restricted only to Romantics proper but comprises the whole post-Kantian idealistic philosophy.1 On the other hand, the recent research also emphasises that it is an oversimplification to consider the proto-Romantic Herder as an opponent of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, with his trust in the human cognitive and practical capacities needed for adapting to the natural living conditions of a people and for creating a culture, with his search for ‘natural laws’ governing the history of mankind – however difficult these laws might be to discern – and with his idea of a Humanity in which all men participate and which simultaneously is an ideal to be attained through the joint effort of mankind in history, Herder is a represent- ative of his enlightened century.2 In his main work Ideen zur Geschichte der Philosophie der Menschheit he, in spite of his criticism of previous Enlightenment historians for their teleological view that history attained its goal in the enlightened eighteenth century, unquestionably stands on their shoulders, as Michael Maurer puts it, not least in his view that the history of mankind should be written as a cultural history and not as a history of sovereigns and wars.3 How the ‘late Enlightenment’ and the ‘proto-Romantic’ strains relate to each other in Herder’s thinking, is a difficult question which still needs considerable clarification.
    [Show full text]
  • New Title in the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought
    H-Judaic TOC: New Title in the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought Discussion published by Sylvia Fuks Fried on Sunday, July 25, 2021 The Tauber Institute and Brandeis University Press are pleased to announce the publication of Hermann Cohen: Writings on Neo-Kantianism and Jewish Philosophy, edited by Samuel Moyn and Robert S. Schine. Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) was among the most accomplished Jewish philosophers in modern times, yet his work has not yet received the attention it deserves. Just as Moses Maimonides sought to recast medieval Jewish thought through the Islamic reception of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, Cohen leveraged his understanding of Immanuel Kant as the beacon of a modern philosophy of individual freedom, an idea that therefore should serve as the basis for a philosophy of Judaism. Moreover, Cohen asserted that Kantian ethics drew from the wellspring of Judaism, especially its prophetic sources. This volume presents three elements of Cohen’s thought as entailing one another: the philosophy of Judaism, neo- Kantianism, and prophetically inspired commitments to social democracy and the dignity of all. This new collection of Hermann Cohen’s writings, most of which are appearing in English for the first time, illuminates his achievements for student readers and rectifies lapses in his intellectual reception by prior generations. It presents chapters from Cohen’s earlier Ethics of Pure Will and essays connecting politics, Judaism, and philosophy. The volume also presents conflicting interpretations of Cohen by Franz Rosenzweig and Alexander Altmann. Ernst Cassirer’s eulogy for Cohen delivered at his graveside also appears here for the first time in English.
    [Show full text]
  • BOOK REVIEWS Imagination and Existence
    BOOK REVIEWS Imagination and Existence. Heidegger's Retrieval of the Kantian Ethic. By Frank Schalow. Lantham, MD: University Press of America, 1986. Pp xiii + 178 pages. Reviewed by Roy Martinez, Speiman College. This is an ambitious book. Besides being tersely written, its arguments are neatly constructed. In order to help the reader make an easy transition between chapters, the author summarizes each chapter at its conclusion. The clarity of language notwithstanding, familiarity with the technical terms of Kant and Heidegger is assumed. Briefly, the author strives to show that in opposition to Kant, who finds it necessary to invoke the eternal in postulating morality, an ethics can be established within the framework of time alone. To do this, he adopts Heidegger's reading of Kant as formulated in the former's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. In addition, to assist him in his reading of Heidegger, he subscribes to Charles M. Sherover, author of Heidegger, Kant, and Time (Indiana University Press, 1971). The author is careful to note, however, that the point he is trying to make is not so much to gainsay Kant as to "reconstruct Kant's ethics." This he does by forging a path for "thinking about ethics in terms of the temporality of the practical self. That is, we see how it is possible to seek the basis for a normative outlook within the scope of human finitude, without having to make an additional assumption about man's kinship with the eternal" (172). The upshot is that practical reason is definable in a manner consonant with Dasein's temporality in the sense that it "displays the meaning of finitude in a more original way than does theoretical reason" (155).
    [Show full text]
  • Selected Writings on Aesthetics This Page Intentionally Left Blank Selected Writings on Aesthetics
    Selected Writings on Aesthetics This page intentionally left blank Selected Writings on Aesthetics Johann Gottfried Herder Translated and edited by Gregory Moore princeton university press princeton and oxford Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744–1803. [Selections. English. 2006] Selected writings on aesthetics / Johann Gottfried Herder ; translated and edited by Gregory Moore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-11595-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-11595-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics. I. Moore, Gregory, 1972– . II. Title. BH39.H456213 2006 111Ј.85—dc22 2005029475 All Rights Reserved British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. ϱ pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 Contents Acknowledgments vii Note on the Texts ix Introduction 1 Is the Beauty of the Body a Herald of the Beauty of the Soul? 31 A Monument to Baumgarten 41 Critical Forests, or Reflections on the Art and Science of the Beautiful: First Grove, Dedicated to Mr. Lessing’s Laocoön 51 Critical Forests: Fourth Grove, On Riedel’s Theory of the Beaux Arts 177 Shakespeare 291 The Causes of Sunken Taste among the Different Peoples in Whom It
    [Show full text]