This book describes the rule of law as the reign of persuasion rather than the reign of force, and democracy as the reign by persuasion rather than the reign by force. It synthesizes a vast amount of current Cassirer-literature and makes a contribution to jurisprudence. The book is the first systematic elaboration on law as a symbolic form and it sheds new light on a still dark area of intellectual and jurisprudential thought.

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's conception of culture & theory of symbolism anticipated much of later cultural theory. The essays in this volume explore aspects of his thinking & demonstrate the influence that it had on later scholarship.

This analysis deals with Old Testament law in the form of legal symbolic acts, defined as non-verbal acts which fulfil a legal function when performed under the proper circumstances and when the legal function is different from the physical result of the act. Legal symbolic acts belong to customary law. Since the customary law of ancient Israel is not as well-known as the codified law, these acts provide important information regarding the customary law of ancient Israel. Legal symbolic acts are also conventional, i.e., they are not so much dependent upon their performance for their meaning as upon the general agreement attached to the acts by those who form the surrounding socio-cultural context. This invites a contextual approach to the texts in which the acts are described. Such a contextual approach also restricts the use of comparative material to an illustrative function. Only when the literary context cannot be used to conclude whether it is a case of a legal symbolic act or not, will the comparative material be used in a further, explanatory sense. The analysis focuses on the three aspects of performance, legal function, and historical explanation, and includes the following acts: raising the hand, shaking the hand, putting the hand under the thigh, walking through a divided animal, sharing a meal, piercing the ear of a slave, anointing the head with oil, grasping the horns of the altar, transferring the mantle, covering a woman with the mantle, removing the sandal, and putting a child on the knees.

Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) occupies a unique place in 20th-century philosophy. His view that human beings are not rational but symbolic animals and his famous dispute with Martin Heidegger at Davos in 1929 are compelling alternatives to the deadlock between 'analytic' and 'continental' approaches to philosophy. An astonishing polymath, Cassirer's work pays equal attention to mathematics and natural science but also art, language, myth, religion, technology, and history. However, until now the importance of his work has largely been overlooked. In this outstanding introduction Samantha Matherne examines and assesses the full span of Cassirer’s work. Beginning with an overview of his life and works she covers the following important topics: Cassirer’s neo-Kantian background Philosophy of mathematics and natural science, including Cassirer’s first systematic work, Substance and Function, and subsequent works, like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity The problem of culture and the ground-breaking The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer’s ethical and political thought and his diagnosis of fascism in The Myth of the State Cassirer’s influence and legacy. Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary of terms, this is an ideal introduction to Cassirer’s thought for anyone coming to his work for the first time. It is essential reading for students in philosophy as well as related disciplines such as intellectual history, art history, politics, and literature.

This book presents the transformation of Cassirer’s transcendental point of view. At an early stage, Cassirer was confronted with a scientific crisis triggered by the emergence of various forms of objective knowledge, such as the plurality of geometric axiom systems and non-Euclidean geometry in relativistic physics. He finally developed a solution to the problematic unity of objective knowledge by replacing the overarching notion of objectivity with that of forms of objectification. This led him to consider the notion of “symbolic forms” as the driving force in the objectification process. This concept would become instrumental in demonstrating that the objective and human sciences are not adversaries; they merely differ in their modes of semiotic construction. These modes cannot be summarized in a fixed list of symbolic forms but operate transversally, at a level where Cassirer distinguishes between three specific operators: Expression, Evocation and Objectification. The last part of the book investigates how the relationships between these three operators stabilize specific symbolic forms. Four of these forms are then studied as examples: Myth and Ritual, Language, Scientific Knowledge, and Technology.

From articles centering on the detailed and doctrinal exposition of the law to those which reside almost wholly within the realm of philosophical ethics, this volume affords comprehensive treatment to both sides of the philosophico-legal equation. Systematic and sustained coverage of the many dimensions of legal thought gives ample expression to the true breadth and depth of the philosophy of law, with coverage of:The modes of knowing and the kinds of normativity used in the law; Studies in international, constitutional, criminal, administrative, persons and property, contracts and to.

From articles centering on the detailed and doctrinal exposition of the law to those which reside almost wholly within the realm of philosophical ethics, this volume affords comprehensive treatment to both sides of the philosophico-legal equation. Systematic and sustained coverage of the many dimensions of legal thought gives ample expression to the true breadth and depth of the philosophy of law, with coverage of: The modes of knowing and the kinds of normativity used in the law; Studies in international, constitutional, criminal, administrative, persons and property, contracts and tort law-including their historical origins and worldwide ramifications; Current legal cultures such as common law and civilian, European, and Aboriginal; Influential jurisprudents and their biographies; All influential schools and methods

This ambitious work reclassifies and restructures the history of ideas and the philosophy of culture through a wide-ranging and novel use of the idea of the organon. It does so by radically revising standard interpretations and theories of all branches of philosophy, and by providing an intellectual and philosophical foundation for the new organon of the cultural sciences. Furthermore, the seeded idea that saw its growth in the form of this book is the unshakable conviction that the only way by which a new apparatus of philosophy, an organon, could be created is by harking back to the vast sources of imagination, inspiration and mimēsis. This entire study is based on the notion that metaphysics, insofar as it is concerned with the world in its entirety and with human being’s existence and thought, should provide the foundation for the organon of cultural sciences, based on symbolic forms. Given that the colossal amount of information and knowledge of philosophy, arts, humanities, logic, mathematics, social sciences and natural sciences cannot be comprised, analyzed and comprehended per se, it is the organon’s objective to extract the main principles, ideas, postulates, theorems and theories of the cultural sciences, and, subsequently, to shape and restructure them as symbolic forms. Since all these principles are grounded on Becoming—which is not a stable or fixed entity such as Being, substance or thing—the symbolic forms preserve and change, elevate and further the organon of the cultural sciences, via a critical-dialectical process.

This book is a critical inquiry into sovereignty and argues that the meaning and functions performed by this concept have changed significantly during the past decades, with profound implications for the ontological status of the state and the modus operandi of the international system as a whole. Although we have grown accustomed to regarding sovereignty as a defining characteristic of the modern state and as a constitutive principle of the international system, Sovereignty as Symbolic Form argues that recent changes indicate that sovereignty has been turned into something granted, contingent upon its responsible exercise in accordance with the norms and values of an imagined international community. Hence we need a new understanding of sovereignty in order to clarify the logic of its current usage in theory and practice alike, and its connection to broader concerns of social ontology: what kind of world do we inhabit, and of what kind of entities is this world composed? This book will be of interest to students of International Relations, Critical Security and International Politics.