Ernst Cassirer - Böcker

I "Myten om staten" spårar den tysk-judiske filosofen Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) det totalitära tänkandets rötter. Den skrevs mot slutet av andra världskriget i amerikansk exil och utkom postumt 1946. Bokens första del analyserar det mytiska tänkandets struktur och knyter an till Cassirers huvudverk "De symboliska formernas filosofi". I den andra delen om ”kampen mot myten i det politiska tänkandet” visar Cassirer sitt mästerskap som filosofihistoriker. Han skildrar här Platons kamp mot sofistiken, konflikten mellan förnuftet och uppenbarelsen hos Augustinus och Thomas av Aquino, Machiavellis sekularisering av politiken och 1600- och 1700-talens teorier om samhällsfördraget. Men myten skulle återvända. I bokens tredje del om ”de moderna politiska myterna” visar Cassirer hur en mytbildning kring ledaren, rasen och staten tar form under 1800-talet. Dessa myter skulle i nationalsocialismen komma att kombineras med en ny ”politisk teknik”, med språklig manipulation och bruk av ett propaganda­maskineri. Marken hade, som Cassirer säger, länge förberetts, men denna teknik verkade som katalysator och gav myterna deras katastrofala kraft. "Myten om staten" utkom i översättning av Alf Ahlberg 1948. Den återutges nu lätt moderniserad, med komplett notapparat och utvidgad med Cassirers artikel ”Juden­domen och de moderna politiska myterna”. Idéhistorikern Jonas Hansson svarar för en introduktion. Ernst Cassirer var en av de mest framträdande filosoferna under första delen av 1900-talet, framför allt känd för sitt trebandsverk "De symboliska formernas filosofi" (1923–29). Kort efter Hitlers maktövertagande flydde Cassirer med sin familj, först till England och sedan till Göteborg, där han erbjöds en professur vid dåvarande Göteborgs högskola, som han innehade 1935–41. Från tiden i Göteborg stammar bl a hans bok "Om kulturvetenskapernas logik" (Daidalos, 2025). På grund av det världspolitiska läget lämnade Cassirer Göteborg för att bli professor vid Yale-universitetet.

Den tysk-judiske filosofen Ernst Cassirers "Om kulturvetenskapernas logik. fem studier" tillkom när han som emigrant från Nazityskland var professor vid Göteborgs Högskola. Boken utkom i högskolans årsskrift 1942, samma år som Cassirer emigrerade vidare till USA. Mot bakgrund av sitt huvudverk, "De symboliska formernas filosofi", behandlar Cassirer här i fem sammanhängande och koncisa studier de humanistiska vetenskapernas historia, grunder och struktur. Han förankrar dessa vetenskaper fenomenologiskt och undersöker vad som utmärker deras begreppsbildning. Kultuvetenskapernas centrala begrepp är, enligt honom, ”form”, till skillnad från kausalitet i naturvetenskaperna, och det är totaliteten av de symboliska former i vilka det mänskliga livet utspelas som dessa vetenskaper vill vinna kunskap om. Avslutningsvis reflekterar Cassirer över temat ”kulturens tragedi” i anslutning till Rousseau och Georg Simmel. Kulturen förstår han som en fortlöpande kommunikativ process: ”kulturens genuint stora verk står aldrig inför oss som något alltigenom förstelnat och fastlagt. […] Deras innehåll finns bara till för oss genom att det ständigt tillägnas på nytt och därigenom gång på gång återskapas.”

Despite our admiration for Renaissance achievement in the arts and sciences, in literature and classical learning, the rich and diversified philosophical thought of the period remains largely unknown. This volume illuminates three major currents of thought dominant in the earlier Italian Renaissance: classical humanism (Petrarch and Valla), Platonism (Ficino and Pico), and Aristotelianism (Pomponazzi). A short and elegant work of the Spaniard Vives is included to exhibit the diffusion of the ideas of humanism and Platonism outside Italy. Now made easily accessible, these texts recover for the English reader a significant facet of Renaissance learning.

"It is, indeed, a testament of wisdom."—New York Times“A brilliant survey of some of the major texts in the history of political theory.”—Kenneth Burke, The Nation"Cassirer was a brilliant historical philosopher and his analyses of vogues in political alchemy . . . are savagely forthright."—New Yorker

“An outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, NatureThe Symbolic Forms has long been considered by many who knew it in the original German as the greatest of Ernst Cassirer's works. Into it, he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which mankind has expressed itself and given intelligible objective form to the human experience.

The Symbolic Forms has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works.  Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience.“These three volumes alone (apart from Cassirer’s other papers and books) make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction.  It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, Nature

The Symbolic Forms has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works.  Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience.  “These three volumes alone (apart from Cassirer’s other papers and books) make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction.  It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, Nature

"Cassirer employs his remarkable gift of lucidity to explain the major ideas and intellectual issues that emerged in the course of nineteenth century scientific and historical thinking. The translators have done an excellent job in reproducing his clarity in English. There is no better place for an intelligent reader to find out, with a minimum of technical language, what was really happening during the great intellectual movement between the age of Newton and our own."—New York Times.

The papers in this volume of Ernst Cassirer’s unpublished works give insight into the major issues that engaged Cassirer’s interest between 1935 and 1945.  The book begins with his inaugural address at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, in the first years of his exile from Hitler’s Germany, and ends with a talk to the Columbia Philosophy Club.  The note that introduces this piece was written on the day of his death.  In his long and productive career, Ernst Cassirer always tried to integrate his works of original philosophy and studies in intellectual history into a general understanding of the nature of myth, culture, and symbol.  These essays show that his interest persisted to the end.  His piece on Judaism and political myths is perhaps the most dramatic in this collection, as it blends philosophical coolness with his deeply felt outrage at fascism.  Best known in this country for The Myth of the State, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and An Essay on Man, Ernst Cassirer has been read and studied by generations of students.  In this book they will find illuminations, in a more informal voice, of the major themes in Cassirer’s work.  New readers will be introduced to the great issues that occupied the interest of one of the twentieth century’s most widely read philosophers.  “A genuine contribution to the history of modern philosophy – and of special value to the informed general reader, since it includes a number of valid attempts by Cassirer to translate his radical, sometimes difficult, concepts of culture into non-technical terms.”-- The Booklist

“Here is the first Kant-biography in English since Paulsen’s and Cassirer’s only full-scale study of Kant’s philosophy. On a very deep level, all of Cassirer’s philosophy was based on Kant’s, and accordingly this book is Cassirer’s explicit coming to terms with his own historical origins. It sensitively integrates interesting facts about Kant’s life with an appreciation and critique of his works. Its value is enhanced by Stephen Körner’s Introduction, which places Cassirer’s Kant-interpretation in its historical and contemporary context.”—Lewis White Beck“The first English translation (well done by James Haden) of a 60-year-old classic intellectual biography. Those readers who know Kant only through the first Critique will find their understanding of that work deepened and illuminated by a long explication of the pre-critical writings, but perhaps the most distinctive contribution is Cassirer’s argument that the later Critiques, and especially the Critique of Judgment, must be understood not as merely applying the principles of the first to other areas but as subsuming the latter into a larger and more comprehensive framework.”—Frederick J. Crown, The Key Reporter“Kant’s Life and Thought is that rare achievement: a lucid and highly readable account of the life and work of one of the world’s profoundest thinkers. Now for the first time available in an admirable English translation, the book introduces the reader to two of the finest minds in the history of philosophy.”—Ashley Montagu

At his death in 1945, the influential German philosopher Ernst Cassirer left manuscripts for the fourth and final volume of his magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene have edited these writings and translated them into English for the first time, bringing to completion Cassirer's major treatment of the concept of symbolic form.Ernst Cassirer believed that all the forms of representation that human beings use—language, myth, art, religion, history, science—are symbolic, and the concept of symbolic forms was the basis of his thinking on these subjects. In this volume, which contains one text written in 1928 and another in about 1940, Cassirer presents the metaphysics that is implicit in his epistemology and phenomenology of culture. The earlier text grounds the philosopher's conception of symbolic forms on a notion of human nature that makes a general distinction between Geist (mind) and life. In the later text, he discusses Basis Phenomena, an original concept not mentioned in any of his previous works, and he compares his own viewpoint with those of other modern philosophers, notably Bergson and Heidegger.

This new translation of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (formerly entitled The Logic of the Humanities) makes Ernst Cassirer’s classic study, long out of print, available to English readers. A German Jew living in exile at the beginning of the Second World War, Cassirer wrote this book—one of his clearest and most concise—in response to the crises besetting his era. It represented to him a rethinking and completion of his magnum opus The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. S. G. Lofts’s translation stays close to the original German and accurately reflects the echoes of the philosophical debates of Cassirer’s day.In the book’s five linked studies, Cassirer considers the intellectual structure of the disciplines we commonly refer to as the humanities. He defines and justifies the basic philosophical perspective of the philosophy of symbolic forms, and he contributes a wealth of ideas to continuing debates about culture and what is unique in human nature.

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.

One of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers presents the results of his lifetime study of man’s cultural achievementsAn Essay on Man is an original synthesis of contemporary knowledge, a unique interpretation of the intellectual crisis of our time, and a brilliant vindication of man’s ability to resolve human problems by the courageous use of his mind. In a new introduction Peter E. Gordon situates the book among Cassirer’s greater body of work, and looks at why his “hymn to humanity in an inhuman age” still resonates with readers today.  “The best-balanced and most mature expression of [Cassirer’s] thought.”—Journal of Philosophy  “No reader of this book can fail to be struck by the grandeur of its program or by the sensitive humanism of the author.”—Ernest Nagel, The Humanist  “A rare work of philosophy and a rare work of art.”—Tomorrow

In this classic work of intellectual history, Ernst Cassirer provides both a cogent synthesis and a penetrating analysis of one of history's greatest intellectual epochs: the Enlightenment. Arguing that there was a common foundation beneath the diverse strands of thought of this period, he shows how Enlightenment philosophers drew upon the ideas of the preceding centuries even while radically transforming them to fit the modern world. In Cassirer's view, the Enlightenment liberated philosophy from the realm of pure thought and restored it to its true place as an active and creative force through which knowledge of the world is achieved. In a new foreword, Peter Gay considers The Philosophy of the Enlightenment in the context in which it was written--Germany in 1932, on the precipice of the Nazi seizure of power and one of the greatest assaults on the ideals of the Enlightenment. He also argues that Cassirer's work remains a trenchant defense against enemies of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century.

Translated by James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. Originally published in 1945. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Translated by James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. Originally published in 1945. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.