Book contents
- Interpreting Cassirer
- Interpreting Cassirer
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Cassirer’s Philosophy of Culture
- Chapter 1 Interaction between Language and the Other Symbolic Forms
- Chapter 2 The Status of Art in Cassirer’s System of Culture
- Chapter 3 Being in Time
- Chapter 4 Science As a Symbolic Form: Ernst Cassirer’s Culture of Reason
- Chapter 5 Quantum Mechanics As the Ultimate Mode of Symbol Formation
- Chapter 6 Spirit in the Age of Technical Production
- Chapter 7 Political Myth and the Problem of Orientation
- Part II Cassirer’s Philosophy of Consciousness
- Part III Cassirer’s Philosophical Method
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - Science As a Symbolic Form: Ernst Cassirer’s Culture of Reason
from Part I - Cassirer’s Philosophy of Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2021
- Interpreting Cassirer
- Interpreting Cassirer
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Cassirer’s Philosophy of Culture
- Chapter 1 Interaction between Language and the Other Symbolic Forms
- Chapter 2 The Status of Art in Cassirer’s System of Culture
- Chapter 3 Being in Time
- Chapter 4 Science As a Symbolic Form: Ernst Cassirer’s Culture of Reason
- Chapter 5 Quantum Mechanics As the Ultimate Mode of Symbol Formation
- Chapter 6 Spirit in the Age of Technical Production
- Chapter 7 Political Myth and the Problem of Orientation
- Part II Cassirer’s Philosophy of Consciousness
- Part III Cassirer’s Philosophical Method
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explains the crucial role that science plays in the framework of the philosophy of symbolic forms. On the one hand, Cassirer’s functionalistic understanding of scientific knowledge is intimately tied with the history of self-liberation from the concept of substance that began with Galileo’s scientific revolution and that resulted in the focus of contemporary physics on purely mathematical symbols. On the other hand, for Cassirer science has broad cultural significance because it is at once the pivotal point of modern culture and remains influenced by other symbolic forms such as myth, language, and art, and ways of world understanding in general. In showing how science represents the 'theoretical self-awareness" of a new era of Western civilization, Ferrari emphasizes not only Cassirer's remaining commitment to Neo-Kantianism but also the continuity between his early epistemological view and broader philosophy of culture.
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- Interpreting CassirerCritical Essays, pp. 72 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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