Abstract:
The various efforts to put the idea of humanity on a secure ethical, political, and social base have not succeeded. The various post-humanist and transhumanist programs are inadequate. Our deep-seated suspicion of our deepest selves and motives is understandable in light of the barbarity of the twentieth century, but humanism is not to blame. The thought of Ernst Cassirer holds a framework for a new humanism, once it is rid of certain colonialist, triumphalist, and Eurocentric ideas that distorted Cassirer’s understanding of the European role in creating the problems of civilization, especially its mistake of thinking that science was a progressive symbolic form of culture. I set out the basis of a new humanism based upon not the problem of knowledge, but the problem of genuine self-situating socialty, a personalist point of view.
Keywords:
Cassirer, post-humanism, humanism, culture, symbolic form, genocide, science, pragmatism, personalism
How to cite:
Auxier, Randall E. “Cassirer: The Coming of a New Humanism.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 2, no. 3(5) (2018): 7–26. https://doi.org/10.26319/5812.
Author:
Randall E. Auxier
Department of Philosophy, Department of Communication Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Faner Hall, Mail Code 4505, 980 Faner Drive, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA
personalist61@gmail.com
References:
Auxier, Randall E. “Eco, Peirce, and the Pragmatic Theory of Signs.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 10, no. 1 (2018), forthcoming; https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1029, accessed July 6, 2018.
Auxier, Randall E. “Signs and Symbols: An Analogical Theory of Metaphysical Language.” Dissertation defended at Emory University, 1992.
Auxier, Randall E. Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce. Chicago: Open Court, 2013.
Auxier, Randall E. “Whitehead and the Revolution in (Higher) Education.” In Contemporary Philosophical Proposals for the University: Toward a Philosophy of Higher Education, edited by Aaron Stoller and Eli Kramer, 217–259. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017.
Auxier, Randall E. Review of Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History by John Michael Krois. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 7, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 159–165.
Bengtsson, Jan Olof. The Worldview of Personalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Bostrom, Nick. “A History of Transhumanist Thought.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 14, no. 1 (April 2005): 1–25; rev. ed. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/history.pdf, accessed July 8, 2018.
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: George Brazziler, 1950.
Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
Collingwood, R.G. Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, Heidegger. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2000.
Gordon, Peter. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Hansson, Jonas. Ernst Cassirer: The Swedish Years. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.
Kemling, Jared. “Creative Fidelity as a Personalized Symbolic Form of Culture.” Dissertation defended at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 2017.
Krois, John Michael. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Lipton, David R. Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual in Germany, 1914–1933. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.
Margolis, Joseph. The Arts and the Definition of the Human: Towards a Philosophical Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Margolis, Joseph. Pragmatism’s Advantage: American and European Philosophy at the End of the 20th Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Margolis, Joseph. Pragmatism Ascendant: A Yard of Narrative, a Touch of Prophecy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.
McCumber, John. Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
Royce, Josiah. “Kant’s Relation to Modern Philosophical Progress.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 15 (1881): 365–377.
Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Translated by Reginald Snell. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963.
Skidelsky, Edward. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Thornhill, Chris. Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics. London: Routledge, 2002.
Wilshire, Bruce. Get ’em All, Kill ’em!: Genocide, Terrorism, and Righteous Communities. Atlantic Highlands NJ: Lexington Books, 2004.
Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Open Access Statement:
This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, as long as the author and original source are properly cited. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Submitting a text to Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture means that the author agrees with the general conditions of this license. The author does and will maintain copyrights and publishing rights for his/her article without any restrictions.