The Philosophy of Enlightment

In this classic work of intellectual history, Cassirer provides both a cogent synthesis and a penetrating analysis of one of history's greatest intellectual epochs: the Enlightenment: Arguing that there was a common foundation beneath the diverse strands of thought of this period, he shows how Enlightenment philosophers drew upon the ideas of the preceding centuries even while radically transforming them to fit the modern world: In Cassirer's view, the Enlightenment liberated philosophy from the realm of pure thought and restored it to its true place as an active and creative force through which knowledge of the world is achieved. Contents: Chapter I: The Mind of the Enlightenment; Chapter II: Nature and Natural Science; Chapter III: Psychology and Epistemology; Chapter IV: Religion; i. The Dogma of Original Sin and the Problem of Theodicy;ii. Tolerance and the Foundation of Natural Religion; iii. Religion and History; Chapter V: The Conquest of the Historical World; Chapter Vi: Law, State, and Society; i. Law and the Principle of Inalienable Rights; iii. The Contract and the Method of the Social Sciences; Chapter VII: Fundamental Problems of Aesthetics; i. The Age of Criticism; ii. Classical Aesthetics and the Objectivity of the Beautiful; iii. Taste and the Trend Toward Subjectivism; iv. Intuitional Aesthetics and the Problem of Genius; v. Reason and the Imagination: Gottsched and the Swiss Critics; vi. The Foundation of Systematic Aesthetics: Baumgarten. Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a German philosopher: Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science; after Cohen's death, he developed a theory of symbolism, and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture: He is one of the leading 20th-century advocates of philosophical idealism

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