The Symbolic Construction of Reality

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One

Foundations: Articulations of the Symbol

1. Symbol and History

Ernst Cassirer’s Critique of the Philosophy of History

Enno Rudolph

2. Ernst Cassirer on Nicholas of Cusa

Between Conjectural Knowledge and Religious Pluralism

Yossef Schwartz

3. History and Philosophy in Ernst Cassirer’s System of Symbolic Forms

Fabien Capeillères

4. Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

A Foundational Reading

Gabriel Motzkin

Part Two

Themes: Symbolic Forms and Philosophy

5. Cassirer’s Metaphysics

Donald Phillip Verene

6. The Limits of Order

Cassirer and Heidegger on Finitude and Infinity

Michael Roubach

7. Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of Myth

On the Ethico-Political Dimension of His Debate with Martin Heidegger

Jeffrey Andrew Barash

Part Three

Ramifications: Symbol, History, Politics

8. The Myth of the State Revisited

Ernst Cassirer and Modern Political Theory

Joseph Mali

9. Cassirer’s Enlightenment and Its Recent Critics

Is Reason Out of Season?

Fania Oz-Salzberger

10. Practicing “Intertextuality”

Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen on Myth and Monotheism

Almut Shulamit Bruckstein

11. The Hero of Enlightenment

Gideon Freudenthal

List of Contributors