Most scholars regard Ernst Cassirer as a thinker in the Marburg Neo-Kantian tradition whose writings take him from its concern with the analysis of the logical foundations of science to problems in intellectual history, theory of language, and culture. The critical work on his thought has reflected and supported this view. There is a second image of Cassirer which is shared by the large number of students and general readers who have come to his thought through two works that appeared (...) at the end of his life—An Essay on Man and the Myth of the State. These works have gone through numerous printings and have appeared in editions in most major Western and Oriental languages. These readers have found in Cassirer not primarily an epistemologist and historian of thought but a philosopher of humanity, an interpreter of the fragmentation of contemporary cultural life and the nature of the political world. These two sides shown by Cassirer’s thought are not exactly opposed, but also they are not joined. (shrink)

Professor Soll’s book is a short, introductory account of some of the central features of Hegel’s metaphysics. It is a welcome addition to literature on Hegel in English for two reasons. It helps to fill a gap that exists for students first coming to Hegel’s work between standard, full-length commentaries on Hegel’s thought and the capsule presentations of it found in histories of philosophy and the commentaries of philosophical anthologies and textbooks. The issues Soll discusses are presented in straight-forward, readable (...) terms, a task which is never easy to accomplish when treating a major philosopher and one traditionally difficult for writers on Hegel. (shrink)