Edward Skidelsky

This is the first English-language intellectual biography of the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a leading figure on the Weimar intellectual scene and one of the last and finest representatives of the liberal-idealist tradition. Edward Skidelsky traces the development of Cassirer's thought in its historical and intellectual setting. He presents Cassirer, the author of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, as a defender of the liberal ideal of culture in an increasingly fragmented world, and as someone who grappled with the opposing forces of scientific positivism and romantic vitalism. Cassirer's work can be seen, Skidelsky argues, as offering a potential resolution to the ongoing conflict between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities--and between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy. The first comprehensive study of Cassirer in English in two decades, this book will be of great interest to analytic and continental philosophers, intellectual historians, political and cultural theorists, and historians of twentieth-century Germany.

Modern economics does not have much use for the classical scheme of virtues and vices. Yet, it appears to recognise prudence, or something lying in the same general region as prudence. In classical philosophy, prudence is the virtue of practical rationality, or rationality in action. Economics too has a theory of rationality in action. This paper asks if this is a good theory – if the actions prescribed by economics are indeed the actions that an ideally prudent counsellor would prescribe. As I argue in what follows, there is reason to think that they are not, and the reason is to be traced back to the crucial dimension of time that is neglected in the economic theory of rational action.

It is often claimed that the core moral concepts are universal, though the words used to articulate them have changed significantly. I reject this claim. Concepts cannot be disentangled from words; as these latter change, they change too. Thus the philosophical analysis of moral concepts cannot overlook the history of the words by which these concepts have been expressed. In the second part of the essay, I illustrate this claim with the example of happiness, showing how its original ‘verdictive’ meaning was overlaid, in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a new psychological sense. Knowledge of this history should make us cautious, I suggest in conclusion, of narrowly psychological accounts of happiness.

I argue that the project of moral enhancement is incipiently contradictory. All our judgements of human excellence and deficiency rest on what I call the human “form of life”, meaning that a radical transformation of this form of life, such as is envisioned by advocates of moral enhancement, would undermine the basis of those judgements. It follows that the project of moral enhancement is self-defeating: its fulfilment would spell the abolition of the very conditions that allow us to describe it as an “enhancement”.

Defenders of happiness surveys often claim that individuals are infallible judges of their own happiness. I argue that this claim is untrue. Happiness, like other emotions, has three features that make it vulnerable to introspective error: it is dispositional, it is intentional, and it is publically manifest. Other defenders of the survey method claim, more modestly, that individuals are in general reliable judges of their own happiness. I argue that this is probably true, but that it limits what happiness surveys might tell us, for the very claim that people are reliable judges of their own happiness implies that we already have a measure of how happy they are, independent of self-reports. Happiness surveys may help us extend and refine this prior measure, but they cannot, on pain of unintelligibility, supplant it altogether.

In 1973, the philosopher George Dickie proposed an ingenious new answer to the old question: what is art? Arthood, he suggested, is not an intrinsic property of objects, but a status conferred upon them by the institutions of the art world. He accordingly attached an exemplary significance to works like Duchamp's urinal, whose very lack of intrinsic distinction focuses our attention upon their institutional context. But his theory was about art in general, and not just readymades. ‘I am not claiming that Duchamp and his friends invented the conferring of the status of art; they simply used an existing institutional device in an unusual way.’

The sociologist Georg Simmel and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer developed strikingly similar theories of modernity. Both viewed the transition from a substantialist to a functionalist view of the world as the modern age's distinguishing characteristic. But they interpreted this transition from very different philosophical perspectives. Simmel subscribed to a phenomenalism derived from Mach, whereas Cassirer advocated an objectivism inspired by a particular interpretation of Kant. This epistemological disagreement helps account for the two thinkers’ divergent cultural attitudes. Whereas Simmel viewed the complex structures of modernity as an alienation from the flow of subjective life, Cassirer viewed them as a proper expression of humanity's symbolising capacity. Simmel's cultural pessimism developed into an enthusiasm for radical collective action, especially during the First World War. Cassirer's optimism, conversely, guarded him against this temptation