141: Ernst Cassirer - Language & Myth

In this episode, we're venturing into the life and thought of Ernst Cassirer, the last humanist of the Enlightenment tradition. Cassirer is widely known today for his debate with Heidegger at Davos, in which Cassirer appeared as the old style philosopher against the new world signified by Heidegger's radical existentialism. And yet, the very fact that this debate was taking as symbolic of the broader trends in philosophy is in some sense a vindication of Cassirer, who believed that mankind was properly undertsood as animale symbolicum: the animal who symbolizes. Thinking in the Neo-Kantian tradition, Cassirer doesn't seem the symbolic world as approximating a "ready-made" world of objects, but as the conceptual organ for experiencing and thinking about the world at all. From this framework, Cassirer advances a remarkable notion: that language and myth are two shoots from the same stem, and if we want to understand language, we should look to the phases of mythic thinking. The central mystery we shall explore is how the "metaphorical transference" can take place, in which a sound comes to stand for an image, and the specific for the general category. At the root of all this, Cassirer raises an intriguing possibility: perhaps all of language originates in magical thinking and spiritual excitement.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(277)

Q&A #16

Season seven begins soon! For now, enjoy a selection of fascinating questions.

11 Aug 2h 51min

The Gay Science #25 (V.372-393)

We've finally arrived at the conclusion of The Gay Science. The theme of these final sections is perspectivism - we have opened up a "new infinite", penetrating beyond narrow, limited views of the wor...

4 Aug 1h 51min

The Gay Science #24 (V.364-371)

We incomprehensible ones - how our thought branches in every direction, how willing we are to shed our bark, to grow, to change! In this episode, we discuss, among many other sections, important passa...

28 Juli 1h 37min

The Gay Science #23 (V.356-363)

In this chapter of our readthrough, we confront "the problem of the actor". Nietzsche predicts that things shall become ever more "artistic" in Europe, as the actor's talent self-falsification becomes...

21 Juli 2h 21min

The Gay Science #22 (V.348-355)

The grand experiment continues with a series of naturalistic explanations for the origins of ideas or modes of life. The scholar's intellectual habits are inherited "in blood and instinct"; Spinoza's ...

14 Juli 1h 54min

The Gay Science #21 (V.343-347)

"You tremble, carcass?" After a long hiatus, we shall now fearlessly embark upon book V of The Gay Science, added to the text in 1887. In this final division of the text, we'll see Nietzsche's attempt...

7 Juli 2h 5min

Q&A #15

You know what it is. Questions get answered. The Gay Science readthrough begins in a week's time.

30 Juni 2h 49min

144: Georges Bataille, part 2 - 1944 Diaries

"You, whoever you are, reading me - take your own chance. Just as, at the moment of writing, I gamble with you." The much-awaited conclusion to season six is here! The year is 1944, and we follow Geor...

23 Juni 1h 44min