This book provides a detailed overview of the approach by two of the leading philosophical theorists of myth.

This book provides a detailed overview of the approach by two of the leading philosophical theorists of myth.

In this important study, Cassirer analyzes the non-rational thought processes that go to make up culture. Includes studies of the metaphysics of the Bhagavat Gita, Ancient Egyptian religion, symbolic logic, and more.

This is the first English-language intellectual biography of the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a leading figure on the Weimar intellectual scene and one of the last and finest representatives of the liberal-idealist tradition. Edward Skidelsky traces the development of Cassirer's thought in its historical and intellectual setting. He presents Cassirer, the author of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, as a defender of the liberal ideal of culture in an increasingly fragmented world, and as someone who grappled with the opposing forces of scientific positivism and romantic vitalism. Cassirer's work can be seen, Skidelsky argues, as offering a potential resolution to the ongoing conflict between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities--and between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy. The first comprehensive study of Cassirer in English in two decades, this book will be of great interest to analytic and continental philosophers, intellectual historians, political and cultural theorists, and historians of twentieth-century Germany.

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

Ernst Cassirer and the Autonomy of Language examines the central arguments in Cassirer’s first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Gregory Moss demonstrates both how Cassirer defends language as an autonomous cultural form and how he borrows the concept of the “concrete universal” from G. W. F. Hegel in order to develop a concept of cultural autonomy. While Cassirer rejected elements of Hegel’s methodology in order to preserve the autonomy of language, he also found it necessary to incorporate elements of Hegel’s method to save the Kantian paradigm from the pitfalls of skepticism. Moss advocates for the continuing relevanceof Cassirer’s work on language by situating it within in the context of contemporary linguistics and contemporary philosophy. This book provides a new program for investigating Cassirer’s work on the other forms of cultural symbolism in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, by showing how the autonomy of culture is one of the leading questions motivating Cassirer’s philosophy of culture. With a thorough comparison of Cassirer’s theory of symbolism to other dominant theories from the twentieth century, including Heidegger and Wittgenstein, this book provides valuable insight for studies in philosophy of language, semiotics, epistemology, pyscholinguistics, continental philosophy, Neo-Kantian philosophy, and German idealism.

This book is a comprehensive study of one of the most insightful and fertile but also most neglected philosophers of the twentieth century, Susanne Langer. Failure to recognise Langer's seminal philosophical sources has led to frequent misinterpretations and misunderstandings of her unique philosophical thought. Beginning with an overview of Langer's life and education, this study provides a much-needed explanation of how Langer's thinking was shaped by four seminal sources: her mentors Henry Sheffer and Alfred North Whitehead and the European philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Langer's ability to unite seemingly disparate fields such logic, art, and embodied cognition around the notion of symbolic form, places aesthetics not at the margins of philosophy but at its very centre. By locating Langer's work in the broader context of major developments in twentieth-century European and American philosophy, Dengerink Chaplin shows how she was often ahead of her time. Shedding new light on Langer as an American philosopher whose innovative thought crosses the customary boundaries between analytic and continental philosophy, this book confirms why she continues to have relevance today.

In 1933 eminent philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) fled Nazi Germany for the United States. His fame in Europe having already been established through a public debate with Martin Heidegger in 1929, Cassirer would go on to become a noteworthy influence on American culture. His most important early writings focused on the symbol and symbolic interaction, exploring how human cultures—from early myth-based ones to our own modern, scientifically oriented time—have used symbols to mediate the basic forms of experience. Following this work, Cassirer extended his insights to encompass a broad spectrum of philosophical themes: from investigations into Western epistemological and scientific traditions to aesthetics and the philosophy of history to anthropology and political philosophy. Reflecting this diversity in Cassirer’s own work, The Symbolic Construction of Reality collects eleven essays by a wide range of contributors from different fields. Each essay analyzes a different aspect of his legacy, reassessing its significance for our contemporary world and bringing much-needed attention to this seminal thinker.

A thorough account of Langer's philosophical career

". . . Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic is a spirited and detailed defence of the fundamental compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism. . . . "[T]he multiple, mostly short, chapters . . . provide so many insights, engage the perspectives of so many thinkers and attack the central topic of the compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism from so many angles that no reader can fail to achieve a greater insight into the matter after reading it than he had before he began." - From the Foreword by Gerard N. Casey MA, LLM, PhD, DLitt., Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin, Associated Scholar, The Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, Fellow, Mises UKHostility to markets can take many forms, not only that of the frankly socialist specter haunting America. Sometimes it's disguised as Christian piety. Exemplary of this is Catholic polemicist Christopher A. Ferrara's ignorant attack on the Austrian School of Economics (ASE) as incarnated in his 2010 The Church and the Libertarian. Championing Distributism and the social democracy that's vended under the label "Catholic Social Teaching," Ferrara claims that the ASE is morally and intellectually at variance with Catholicism. Anthony Flood (Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness) responded with anarcho-catholic, a blog on which he argued for the compatibility, even harmony, that Ferrara denied. His book is an object lesson in how a Christian ought not to conduct controversy, and Flood counts the ways. Believing that the evidence and arguments marshaled in his blog posts should have a wider platform, Flood has resurrected them as Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic. Included are several of Flood's well-received essays: on Lord Acton as a libertarian Catholic; a review of The Church and the Market by Thomas Woods (Ferrara's former collaborator); and a defense of the idea of international "anarchy" against David Ray Griffin's argument that it is a "cause of war." Introducing them is Flood's uncompromising criticism of the pro-abortion stance of his late mentor and friend, the Dean of the ASE Murray N. Rothbard. In his preface Flood outlines his current views, which move beyond (without denying the insights of) Austro-Libertarianism (which is theologically neutral) while suggesting a Biblically based attitude toward the politics in the present dispensation as ultimately futile, if inevitable.