Online research in philosophy

An autobiographical account of a formative experience -- Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms -- Art and science as supplementing forms -- The parting of the ways and the divide in organizational theory -- Cassirer in the light of neuroscience -- Bringing Cassirer into organizations -- The institution as a symbolic form.

Perspective, Symbol, and Symbolic Form: Concerning the Relationship between Cassirer and Panofsky During the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was a sudden surge of interest in Ernst Cassirer’s major work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), and Erwin Panofsky’s essay, ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’ (1927), an interest that has continued uninterrupted to the present day. Particularly amongst art historians, however, a serious misunderstanding remains evident here – the confusing of ‘symbolic form’ with ‘symbol’. Cultural and perceptual mediations, in which objects (and subjects) are only just in the process of forming, are carelessly turned into arbitrary, isolated objects of art history or pictorial history. Every work, in this view, is regarded as a ‘symbolic form’ to the extent that a representation of the world is ‘expressed’ in it. This article initially reviews Panofsky’s essay in order to establish the context in which the art historian uses the term ‘symbolic form’. His use of it is then compared with Cassirer’s original understanding of the term. A careful distinction is made between ‘symbol’, ‘symbolic pregnance’, and ‘symbolic form’, and this is followed by an analysis of scattered remarks in Cassirer’s writings, and particularly in his posthumous manuscripts and notes, on ‘art’ as symbolic form and on the spatial form that is prior to all perception and art production, as well as his call for a kind of art history that conceives of itself as a scholarly discipline. The article concludes with the recognition that Panofsky not only deliberately, but justifiably – that is, in the spirit of Cassirer, at least – transferred the expression ‘symbolic form’ to ‘perspective’.

Aux deuxièmes sessions de Davos, les sujets principaux de la controverse entre Cassirer et Heidegger sont des questions sur la liberté, l'humanité et le suprapersonnel. Les différences entre les deux penseurs se manifestent très clairement à propos de la question du sens philosophique de l'angoisse face à lafinitude et à la mort. Tandis que Heidegger trouve le salut dans l'être-même, par-delà lafinitude de l'homme et du Dasein, la réponse de Cassirer est définie par le fait de rester dans la finitude et par la tentative de forger à partir de là des constructions idéales qui n'aient pas un caractère sotériologique. Kernpunkt der Debatte zwischen Cassirer une Heidegger an den zweiten Davoser Hochschulkursen sind die Fragen nach der Freiheit, der Humanität und dem Bezug zum Überpersönlichen. Die Differenzen zwischen den beiden Denken zeigen sich besonders deutlich an der Frage nach dem Sinn der Angst vor der Endlichkeit und dem Tod für die Philosophie. Während Heidegger über die Endlichkeit des Menschen und des Daseins das Heil im Sein selbst finden, ist Cassirers Antwort vom Bleiben in der Endlichkeit und vom Versuch, von hier aus ideale Konstrukte zu finden, die nicht Heilscharakter haben, gekennzeichnet.

Biographical material.--Descriptive and critical essays on the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer.--The philosopher speaks for himself.--Bibliography of the writings of Ernst Cassirer.

In this paper, I situate Hans Blumenberg historically and conceptually in relation to a subtheme in the famous debate between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Switzerland in 1929. The subtheme concerns Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s divergent attitudes toward philosophical anthropology as it relates to the starting points and goals of philosophy. I then reconstruct Blumenberg’s anthropology, which involves reconceptualizing Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms in relation to Heidegger’s objections to the philosophical anthropology of his day (e.g., Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen) as unduly anthropocentric. Blumenberg builds on anthropologist Gehlen’s assumption that human beings are biologically underdetermined and therefore world-open. With this starting point, symbolic forms, such as myth and language, make up a compensatory life-world that supports human existence. Action, or self-assertion, which is necessary given the lack of a seamless fit between human beings and the environment, is thus circumscribed and shaped by the historied, cultural constructs that constitute a life-world. Human beings can thus be characterized as a species that continually renegotiates the shape of its existence through its relation to biological limits on the one hand and cultural constants on the other. Because Blumenberg and philosophical anthropology are relatively unexplored by Anglophone philosophers, and because philosophical anthropology is central to Blumenberg’s methodology generally, this study provides an introduction to both.

On the surface, Ernst Cassirer's and Martin Heidegger's discussion in Davos (1929) can be understood as confontation between Cassirer's neo-kantian Philosophy of Culture and Heidegger's phenomenological Analysis of Existence (Daseinsanalyse). This common understanding however neglects, that both contrahents try to overcome the same problem: though in totally different ways, they try to overcome the speculative (logical and metaphysical) problem concerning the Unity of (theoretical and practical) reason, that was set by their late teacher resp. colleague Paul Natorp.