Ursula Renz

This paper examines the way in which Cassirer implicitly commented on current issues in his historical studies, proposing a case study on his monograph The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, published in November 1932. It begins with a general overview of a few famous and a few neglected instances of Cassirer’s position-takings through historical studies, before discussing briefly the context in which this monograph was written and examining how the Enlightenment is presented in the monograph from 1932. The paper claims that at the centre of Cassirer’s engagement with the Enlightenment was his concern with the autonomy of reason. The way in which Cassirer elaborated on this further shows that his defense of the Enlightenment was not just directed against the threats of totalitarian politics, but also had the aim of clarifying the nature of philosophy and its place in culture. This, however, the paper concludes, does not refute the notion that Cassirer was concerned with current politics when writing The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. The point is rather that he comprehended philosophy as political just in virtue of its exercising the autonomy that characterizes reason.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the concept of the human life-form in philosophy. On the one hand, some have argued that in order to conceive of an individual living being in terms of specific properties, it is necessary to refer to the life form shared by the members of its species. On the other hand, it has been argued that the idea of a good life for humans requires that we think of man’s possible actions and passions in the horizon of the human life form. This article examines whether there is in Spinoza an idea of a specific life-form of humans. Taking the notion of a specifically human good, which is invoked in the Metaphysical Thoughts and in a few parallel passages in the Ethics, it first argues that Spinoza does in fact assume the idea of human species in his philosophy. Examining the correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, it next argues that an interpretation of Spinoza’s views on modality can be developed in a way that allows for the notion of (non-actualized) human capacities. It then discusses how the idea of species is related with the conatus doctrine, before it concludes with a few remarks on the contribution of culture to the development of the human life form. Altogether, the article defends the twofold view that there is conceptual space for the notion of a human life-form in Spinoza and that this notion is crucial for several aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy.

In the introduction to the Leviathan, Hobbes famously defends the anthropological point of departure of his theory of the state by invoking the Delphic injunction ‘Know thyself!’ of which he presents a peculiar reading thereafter. In this paper, I present a reading of the anthropology of the Leviathan that takes this move seriously. In appealing to Delphic injunction, Hobbes wanted to prompt a particular way of reading his anthropology for which it is crucial that the reader relate the presented anthropological views to his self-conception. The anthropology of the Leviathan is thus a kind of manual for a certain kind of self-reflection by which the reader's self-knowledge is to be improved. Furthermore, I will argue that Hobbes' interpretation of the Delphic injunction illuminates several theoretical issues relevant to the epistemology of that kind of ‘self-knowledge’ that was demanded by the Delphic injunction. While Hobbes does not solve all the epistemological problems related with the ideal appealed to by this inscription, he does provide some interesting insights into some general requirements that any epistemological account of Socratic self-knowledge has to meet.

This article discusses the question whether or not Cassirer’s philosophical critique of technological use of myth in The Myth of the State implies a revision of his earlier conception and theory of myth as provided by The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In the first part, Cassirer’s early theory of myth is compared with other approaches of his time. It is claimed that Cassirer’s early approach to myth has to be understood in terms of a transcendental philosophical approach. In consequence, myth is conceived as a form of cultural consciousness which is constituted by specific symbolic processes. In the second part, the theoretical assumptions underlying Cassirer’s criticism of myth are discussed and compared with his earlier theory. It is argued that there is a strong conceptual and theoretical continuity between Cassirer’s early views on myth as a symbolic form and his later critique of technological use of myth

This paper takes Udo Thiel’s The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume as an example of a study that aims to provide an account of a particular philosophical development, and discusses both the methodological requirements and the philosophical commitments connected with this ambition. In a first step, I distinguish between two fundamentally different ways of thinking about philosophical development, viz. externalism and internalism with regard to historical developments in philosophy, and I consider two ways of defining the two respective positions. Next, I specify certain methodological decisions that are relevant when writing a study on a particular philosophical development, and I characterize Udo Thiel’s book with respect to them. While no definitive position is taken with regard to the issues raised, the paper does advocate a reflective approach to them.