Chapter 4 - Science As a Symbolic Form: Ernst Cassirer’s Culture of Reason

Summary

This chapter explains the crucial role that science plays in the framework of the philosophy of symbolic forms. On the one hand, Cassirer’s functionalistic understanding of scientific knowledge is intimately tied with the history of self-liberation from the concept of substance that began with Galileo’s scientific revolution and that resulted in the focus of contemporary physics on purely mathematical symbols. On the other hand, for Cassirer science has broad cultural significance because it is at once the pivotal point of modern culture and remains influenced by other symbolic forms such as myth, language, and art, and ways of world understanding in general. In showing how science represents the 'theoretical self-awareness" of a new era of Western civilization, Ferrari emphasizes not only Cassirer's remaining commitment to Neo-Kantianism but also the continuity between his early epistemological view and broader philosophy of culture.