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 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is one of the landmarks of twentieth century philosophy. Drawing from the influential work of Wilhelm Dilthey, it transformed neo-Kantianism into a new robust philosophy of culture. The second volume, on Mythical Thinking, analyzes the fundamental layers of perception and expression as well as the articulations with religion and the dialectic with other forms, essentially language and art. The intellectual breadth of the volume is remarkable. It initiated the debate with Martin Heidegger and prompted a long-lasting meditation by Hans Blumenberg. We are only beginning to recognize its importance for our understanding of the power of images in the construction of aesthetics, the self, and the socio-political world. It initiated a discussion within French sociology (Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss) that ultimately resurfaced in Pierre Bourdieu, while today it is considered as a resourceful path for cultural and critical theory (Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth M. Panfilio). Finally, this volume also offers solid grounds for a political critique of Nazism - specifically: Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf - as well as the new emerging totalitarian ideologies." Fabien Capeilleres, Professor of Philosophy, editor of the French edition of Cassirer’s Works. This new translation makes Cassirer’s seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator’s introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

“In his Phenomenology of Cognition, Cassirer provides a comprehensive and systematic account of the dynamic process involved in the whole of human culture as it progresses from the world of myth and its feeling of social belonging to the highest abstractions of mathematics, logic and theoretical physics. Cassirer engages with the most sophisticated and cutting-edge work in fields ranging from ethnology to classics, egyptology and assyriology to ethology, brain science and psychology to logic, mathematics and theoretical physics. His command of philosophy, literature, and the arts is superb. Echoing his work on Kant, Cassirer begins The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with the problem posed by the meaning of being for philosophy since Plato. But Cassirer also shows that this problem gains new significance with Kant and with the development of modern culture. Cassirer weaves his conception of the development of knowledge into a broadly Kantian and German idealist dynamic-historical conception of significance and of experience that refuses to accept a fundamental opposition between literary, philosophical and scientific culture. In consequence of his great vision grounded in careful reflection and argument, Cassirer’s systematic conception of the Copernican cosmopolitan-cosmological revolution is still philosophically and scientifically unmatched in contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the Pacific.” Pierre Keller, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside, USA. This new translation makes Cassirer’s seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator’s introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

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.

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.

"The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a milestone in twentieth century philosophy. Promoting a philosophical vision informed by Kant, it incorporates the philosophical advances achieved in the nineteenth century by German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, whilst acknowledging the contributions made by his contemporary phenomenologists. It also encompasses empirical and historical research on culture and the most contemporary work on myth, linguistics and psychopathology. As such, it ranks in philosophical importance along with other major works of the twentieth century, such as Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the first volume, Cassirer explores the symbolic form of language. Already recognized by thinkers in the tradition of German Idealism, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, language is the primary medium by which we interact with others and form a common world. As Cassirer emphasizes in the famous Davos Debate with Heidegger, 'there is one objective human world, in which a bridge is built from individual to individual. That I find in the primal phenomenon of language.' The famous trias Cassirer discerns in the functioning of language – the functions of expression (Ausdruck), presentation (Darstellung), and signification (Bedeutung) – has become paradigmatic for accounts of language, philosophical, linguistic, and anthropological alike." Sebastian Luft, Professor of Philosophy, Marquette University, USA. This new translation makes Cassirer’s seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator’s introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index.

Moral Images of Freedom resurrects the Kantian project of affirmative political philosophy and traces its oft-forgotten influences found in thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Benjamin. Drucilla Cornell responds to nihilistic claims about the empty purpose of critical theory in a world so utterly captured by violence in all of its worst forms: economic, social, political, and cultural. Cornell instead draws together a sweeping thread of hope in the varied symbolic forms of freedom persistent throughout the work of a broader range of critical theorists and addresses the burning challenge for such work to respond seriously to the need for a decolonization of critical theory itself and a sustained commitment to the possible future of socialism.

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.

Linguistic Turns rewrites the intellectual and cultural history of early twentieth-century Europe. In chapters that study the work of Saussure, Russell, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Cassirer, Shklovskii, the Russian Futurists, Ogden and Richards, Sorel, Gramsci, and others, it shows how European intellectuals came to invest 'language' with extraordinary force, at a time when the social and political order of the continent was itself in question. By examining linguistic turns in concert rather than in isolation, the volume changes the way we see them--no longer simply as moves in individual disciplines, but as elements of a larger constellation, held together by common concerns and anxieties. In a series of detailed readings, the volume reveals how each linguistic turn invested 'language as such' with powers that could redeem not just individual disciplines but Europe itself. It shows how, in the hands of different writers, language becomes a model of social and political order, a tool guaranteeing analytical precision, a vehicle of dynamic change, a storehouse of mythical collective energy, a template for civil society, and an image of justice itself. By detailing the force linguistic turns attribute to language, and the way in which they contrast 'language as such' with actual language, the volume dissects the investments made in words and sentences and the visions behind them. The constellation of linguistic turns is explored as an intellectual event in its own right and as the pursuit of social theory by other means.