The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer

J Tyler Friedman, Sebastian Luft, J Tyler Friedman, Sebastian Luft

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110421835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This volume brings Cassirer's work into the arena of contemporary debates both within and outside of philosophy. All articles offer a fresh and contemporary look at one of the most prolific and important philosophers of the 20th century. The papers are authored by a wide array of scholars working in different areas, such as epistemology, philosophy of culture, sociology, psychopathology, philosophy of science and aesthetics.

Part I: Cassirer and the Philosophy of Science

Massimo Ferrari (Torino)

Ernst Cassirer and the History of Science4

1Philosophy of Science and the History of Science

The importance attributed to Cassirer as a philosopher of cultural, symbolic forms has often led the scholarship to underestimate the role played by science in the framing of his thought. Until recently, therefore, the historical development of scientific knowledge as a pivotal point in his thought has largely been neglected. More specifically, many critical studies devoted to Cassirer seem to overlook the fact that not only was he capable of offering illuminating interpretations of Goethe’s, Schiller’s or Humboldt’s works, but he could also provide profound accounts of the origins of modern science from Galileo to Newton, as well as Einstein’s or Heisenberg’s physical theories. In his late article “Mathematical Mystique and Mathematical Science of Nature” (1940), Cassirer stressed that not only is the history of science a crucial issue for both the philosopher and the historian of philosophy, but that the question of the origins of the exact sciences represents a philosophical focus which cannot be ignored.5 Moreover, this question, which Cassirer considered to be fundamental, is already present at the very beginnings of his intellectual development. His first, great book on Leibniz, published in 1902, is devoted to an inquiry into the ‘scientific foundations’ of Leibniz’s system and breaks with the traditional image of Leibniz as the author of a metaphysical novel about the Monadology.6 Thus, this investigation of Leibniz as a seminal mathematician and physician of his time constitutes Cassirer’s first attempt at grasping the scientific roots of modern science and philosophy. The next step in his project devoted to the ‘prehistory of pure reason’ is even more impressive—the masterful book The Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophy and Science of the Modern Time, which appeared in 1906–1907. These two volumes serve as a testament to Cassirer’s very fruitful insights into the historical and systematic development of epistemology in its connection with, and in its reliance on, the modern mathematical science of nature.7

This central feature of Cassirer’s work is closely related to his commitment to Marburg Neo-Kantianism which is, in turn, either scarcely considered by scholarship or solely remembered more as a biographical, rather than properly philosophical, background of Cassirer’s thought. In reality, however, the legacy of Hermann Cohen’s and Paul Natorp’s Neo-Kantianism represents the basic framework of Cassirer’s intellectual enterprise—not only biographically, but also with respect to the entire development of his thinking, including his later ‘philosophy of culture’.8 While there are certainly many important differences that gradually emerge on the road from early Neo-Kantianism to the final outcome of his ‘philosophy of symbolic forms,’ Cassirer always remains faithful to at least the essential methodological premise of the Neo-Kantianism which Cohen and Natorp formulated. According to Cohen, whose 1871 book Kant’s Theory of Experience is doubtless the ‘Bible’ of the Marburg School, transcendental philosophy rests on the ‘Faktum’ of the mathematical science of nature. This ‘fact’, as Cohen suggests, is both historically determined and steadily changing, and demands an analysis which uncovers the conditions of its possibility, thereby discovering the synthetic principles and epistemological foundations of mathematical science itself.9 This is the reason why Cohen maintains that the commonly used term ‘theory of knowledge’ is misleading, whereas the proper description of Kant’s reformulated project would be ‘the critique of knowledge’ (Erkenntniskritik).10 Thus, transcendental philosophy deals neither with the constitution of the human subject, nor with his ability to know, but rather with the ‘meta-level’ of philosophical and epistemological reflection about the a priori conditions of scientific knowledge. In short, ‘the critique of knowledge’ aims to uncover the a priori presuppositions and foundations of scientific thought beginning with the given, historically determined ‘fact’ of natural science. This is precisely what Cohen, and the Marburg School in general, call the ‘transcendental method’.11 To some extent, this method can be considered an early attempt to perform the ‘logical analysis of science’ practiced later by Rudolf Carnap and Logical Empiricism, all of whom rejected an account of scientific knowledge still committed to psychologism.12 But Marburg Neo-Kantianism was particularly devoted to an investigation of the history of mathematics, especially mathematical science, which aimed to show, for instance, how infinitesimal analysis, non-Euclidean geometries, modern logic, and profound transformations in physics at the turn of the 20th century had radically changed the ‘Faktum’ to which transcendental philosophy refers. As is demonstrated by Natorp’s studies on Copernicus, Descartes, Hobbes, and Leibniz, this was also connected with the ambitious project of revisiting the history of philosophy with regard to its relationship to the development of science or, in other words, to the changing ‘fact’ of science.13

Yet it was Cassirer who first understood the true significance of the historical and mutable dimensions of this ‘developing fact’ for a Kantian epistemological project, and in so doing, he bound, more deeply than his Marburg predecessors, the fate of critical philosophy to its relationship with the development of the exact sciences. Cassirer thus located the sole enduring task of a critical inquiry based on the transcendental method in the “continually renewed examination of the fundamental concepts of science, […] which simultaneously involves a thorough subjective self-examination of the critique itself.”14 But if the ‘fact’ of science is “in its nature a historically developing fact”,15 then philosophical reflection about the forms of knowledge that underlie this ‘fact’ and make it possible must be characterized by a fundamental dynamism—a dynamism which is intrinsic to the formation of the transcendental method and also enables its extension to all areas of cultural objective forms. In his 1906 Introduction to the first volume of The Problem of Knowledge, Cassirer writes:

The ‘fact’ of science is, and will of course remain, in its nature a historically developing ‘fact’. If this insight does not yet appear explicitly in Kant, if his categories can still appear as finished ‘core concepts of reason’ in both number and content, the modern development of critical and idealistic logic [here he’s referring to Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis] has made this point perfectly clear. By the forms of judgment are meant the unified and active motivations (Motive) of thought which course through the manifold particular formations and are continually put to use in the generation and formulation of new categories.16

Thus, Cassirer’s impressive reconstruction of the problem of knowledge in modern times from the historical and systematic standpoint is the result of his Neo-Kantian apprenticeship and, at the same time, the highest proof of his very original approach to the epistemological reflection about the scientific ‘Faktum’ with which the transcendental method deals. On the one hand, Cassirer’s main idea is that science and philosophy must be mutually connected; modern philosophy and modern science constitute a unique whole and, more precisely, the understanding of the problem of knowledge must consider both philosophers such as Descartes or Leibniz as well as scientists such as Galileo, Kepler or Newton. According to Cassirer, the traditional history of philosophy has, for the most part, neglected the essential ways in which the rise of modern science contributed to the deep changes that have occurred in philosophical thought. In the early modern age, scientists and philosophers worked together on a new image of both nature and the universe, which also entailed a radical break from the previous conception of man. For Cassirer, the final outcome—and the final goal—of this history is Kant’s critical philosophy. To some extent, Cassirer deals here with a kind of ‘history of pure reason’ in the Kantian sense, which is based on—as Cassirer emphasizes—the strict collaboration between the epistemological standpoint and historical enquiry.17 On the other hand, Cassirer intended to continue the ambitious project which the young Natorp had sketched in his early book on Descartes’ theory of knowledge, namely, to outline the prehistory (Vorgeschichte) of Kant’s critical philosophy through a philosophical and historical examination of its sources in the philosophy and scientific thought of Descartes, Galileo, Kepler and Leibniz, the founders of the idealistic tradition in the sense of Marburg ‘logical idealism’, whose origins Cohen, and later Natorp himself, saw in Plato’s theory of ideas.18 Surely, nobody will deny that Cassirer goes far beyond the original conception of the history of philosophy and the history of science endorsed by Cohen and Natorp. Nevertheless, it would be quite impossible to outline Cassirer’s own achievement in this field without taking into account his former apprenticeship in Marburg and the enduring influence of Neo-Kantianism on his work. Insofar as it is plausible to speak of a Neo-Kantian tradition in the history of science in the first decades of the 20th century, Cassirer is surely both its most representative interpreter and its first promoter. But it is not only for these reasons that Cassirer is still of greatest interest to the wide contemporary community of professional historians of science.

2The Question of Continuity and Progress in Scientific Thought

Since its very beginnings, Cassirer’s work on the history of science is not only deeply connected with the history of epistemology, but rests also on the firm belief that—as he already states in the introduction to The Problem of Knowledge—modern science is also a cultural form, a way in which the spirit of early modern culture shows one of its most typical characteristics. According to Cassirer, science is connected to the various “intellectual energies” which have contributed to the rise of the early modern age, from Humanism to the Scientific Revolution. In this sense, science represents the core—as Cassirer says—of the “theoretical self-awareness” of a new era in human culture.19 This insight constitutes a kind of leitmotiv in Cassirer’s work: even in the later period of his intellectual life he stresses the break represented most notably by Galileo, whose main achievement was the essential transformation of scientific thought thanks to a new concept of truth which resulted in an “ethics of science”.20

In his wonderful book on Renaissance thought published 20 years after the Erkenntnisproblem, Cassirer offers a more detailed account of the intrinsic relationship between the rise of modern science and the heritage of Renaissance culture. Individuum und Kosmos in der P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part I: Cassirer and the Philosophy of Science
• Part II: Epistemology and the History of Philosophy
• Part III: The Philosophy of Culture Today
• Endnotes
• Subject index
• Index of names