Forms of Knowledge & Sensibility
Ernst Cassirer & the Human Sciences

Edited by Gunnar Foss & Eivind Kasa
Translated from Swedish by Gunnar Sandin
January 2003
Hoyskoleforlaget Norwegian Academic Press
ISBN: 82-7634-371-6
223 pages, Illustrated, 5 3/4" x 8 3/4"
$74.00 Paper Original

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Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) came from a wealthy Jewish family in Breslau. He studied philosophy at Marburg along with the well-known Neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. He left behind a huge body of work that includes studies of fundamental importance to several branches of philosophy. Today, he is best known as a theorist of knowledge and as a cultural philosopher. The Marburg philosophers differ from their Neo-Kantian colleagues in the so-called Baden School in their refusal to sanction that theoretical division between the humanities and the natural sciences upheld by their opponents. For the Marburg philosophers, the object of the natural sciences was also dependent on an interpretive approach. For them, each human individual acts in all contexts of life as an interpretative being, or as an "animal symbolicum." In this work he uses his theory of "symbolic forms" to further develop Kant's critique of reason into a constructivist theory of the cultural sciences. This anthology concentrates on various aspects of Cassirer's work in epistemology and cultural philosophy. Contributors include well-known Cassirer scholar, like Heinz Paetzold, John Michael Krois, Dag Osterberg, Frederik Stjernfelt and Peer F. Bundgard, Peter Cassirer, offers a biographical sketch on Ernst Cassirer's life and work.

Philosophy
Kulturstudier No. 22

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