The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 1-3. [antikvár]

Preface by Charles W. Hendel It was thirty years ago that the first translation into English of any of the works of Ernst Cassirer appeared—5«teanirf and Function (by William Curtis Swabey and Mary Collins Swabey, Chicago and London, Open Court Publishing Co., 1923). Nothing followed unül nineteen years later, ill 1944, when Cassirer himself wrote in English An Essay on Man. Since then scarcely a year has passed without the announcement of another work in translation. This interest in Cassirer's writings was due at first to his own personality as he came to be known by many during his four years of residence in this country, teaching at Yale and Columbia universities. But it has mounted steadily since his death in 1945, and the chief reason may be that readers have discovered a new aspect of his philosophy. For it was in truth much too limited a view of Cassirer that prevailed before his arrival in America. The book entided Substance and Function contained two items, the major piece being a rendering of Substanzhegriß und Fun\tionsbegriß which Cassirer had written and published thirteen years earlier, the second a writing of more recent date, Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie (1921). At the time this volume came out there was an absorbing general interest in the Einstein theory and in the philosophical aspect of physical science. The consequence was hardly avoidable that the philosophy of Cassirer should appear to be solely a philosophy of science. Though the first piece did contain indications of a wider range of meaning they were practically unnoticed amid the contemporary scientific preoc-cupadons of the readers. It is a remarkable historic coincidence that the year of the publication of Substance and Function in America was also the date of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen: Die Sprache, in Germany (Berlin, Bruno Cassirer). A second volume followed in 1925 with the subdde Das mythische Denzen. After four years came the third part, on Phänomenologie der Erl^enntnis. And all this remained largely unknown in this country except to those scholars who were studying German philosophy in the original texts or some others interested as specialists in the different subjects of language, myth, and the theory of knowledge. Thus when Cassirer came