Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2 results

Interpreting Cassirer
  • Critical Essays
  • Edited by Simon Truwant
  • Published online:
    17 April 2021
    Print publication:
    01 April 2021
  • This is the first comprehensive volume in English on Cassirer's philosophy for over seventy years. Eleven leading Cassirer scholars address all of the key aspects of Cassirer's multi-faceted thought and situate them in the wider context of his philosophy of culture. Their essays demonstrate the depth and richness of a philosophical enterprise that still awaits recognition as one of the most original contributions to twentieth-century philosophy. Interpreting Cassirer will prove invaluable not only for Cassirer scholars and researchers of early twentieth-century philosophy, but also for scholars of the philosophy of culture, language, science, art, history, and mind.

  • Chapter 2 - The Status of Art in Cassirer’s System of Culture

  • from Part I - Cassirer’s Philosophy of Culture
  • Edited by Simon Truwant, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
  • Book:
    Interpreting Cassirer
    Published online:
    17 April 2021
    Print publication:
    01 April 2021, pp 34-52

  • Summary

    In this chapter, Samantha Matherne solves a number of tensions in Cassirer’s dispersed writings about art. Does art align with the “expressive” or the “representative” function of consciousness? And is art, like myth and religion, a cultural domain that we are supposed to surpass toward mathematics and natural science, or is it also situated on the highest rungs of human culture? Matherne first argues that Cassirer defends a cognitivist rather than an expressivist theory of art, according to which art represents the intuitive forms of external objects and emotions. Next, she attributes to Cassirer a “liberal” theory of cultural teleology, which allows for culture to progress toward different goals. On this basis, she holds that, for Cassirer, although mathematics and natural science are more advanced than art with respect to progress toward conceptual knowledge, art is more advanced than all the other symbolic forms when it comes to intuitive insight.In this way, Matherne elucidates not just the place but the place of priority that art has in Cassirer’s system of culture.