Work · Science & Human Sciences
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
Language, myth and science as forms in which the mind builds its world – Kant’s critique extended to culture.
Introduction
Cassirer wrote the three volumes as a professor in Hamburg, where the Warburg Library of cultural history gave him rich material; they appeared in 1923 (language), 1925 (mythical thought) and 1929 (the phenomenology of knowledge). The work extends Kant’s question about the conditions of knowledge to culture as a whole: each symbolic form – language, myth, religion, art, science – has its own way of giving the world meaning and order. The volumes trace a development from expressive, mythical meaning to the purely relational concepts of mathematics and physics. Drafts for a fourth volume were published only long after his death. The work is read today in cultural theory, semiotics and the philosophy of language.
Connections
Builds on
- Critique of Pure Reason1781 · Immanuel Kant
Taken up in
- Philosophy in a New Key1942 · Susanne K. Langer
- An Essay on Man1944 · Ernst Cassirer
More works by Ernst Cassirer
- 1944An Essay on Man
Sources: Wikidata
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