Content area
Full text
Samantha Matherne has written an excellent, timely introduction to the thought of Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), the brilliant polymath who was the last representative of the “Marburg school” of neo-Kantianism, and who is well-known for wrangling a wide range of cultural phenomena into a system of “symbolic forms.” Despite Cassirer’s recent rise in prominence in the English-speaking philosophical world, there is only one other single-volume survey of his thought in English, Edward Skidelsky’s Ernst Cassirer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Matherne’s book has the merit of helping to shore up this scholarly gap, and of providing a clear and succinct presentation of the philosophical system that Cassirer built over the course of his lengthy career.
Matherne’s book begins with an overview of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, the community of philosophers that also included Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. This reflects Matherne’s view that Cassirer remained essentially a Marburg neo-Kantian throughout his career, notwithstanding the highly original direction that his work was to take (30). The characteristic commitment of the Marburg school is an appealing humility regarding the role of philosophy. According to the Marburg school, the philosopher’s job is not to construct novel systems of understanding; it is to analyze the systems of understanding, and forms of culture more generally, that actually exist.
What exactly does this entail? According to Matherne, the Marburg school thinkers seek to illuminate forms of culture such as science, ethics, and aesthetics by spelling out their “conditions of possibility” (34). This does not mean interrogating the socioeconomic factors that have allowed a given cultural formation to emerge at a particular place and time. Instead, the Marburg school thinkers target the conceptual preconditions of cultural structures. What are the basic assumptions that thought brings to bear on experience such that physics, or aesthetic experience,...