To commemorate the centenary of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms this essay focuses on how Cassirer in the development of a distinctive philosophical method analyzed the newest development within philosophy and science. Discussing Einstein's theory of relativity and Russell's formal logic Cassirer found tools to expand the critique of reason into a critique of culture. The course of argumentation is as follows. At the outset Cassirer's outline of the idea of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in the 1920 book Einstein's Theory of Relativity is presented as a reaction to the increasing distance between theoretical physics and ordinary experience. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms can be read as an answer to an inner methodological demand within critical idealism. I encircle this motif in Cassirer's comment that Plato's idealism, understood as the dianoia of thought, is reiterated in Kant's transcendental philosophy and Herman Cohen's reception of Kant. This leads to a discussion of how Cassirer breaks away from Cohen by the positive reception of Russell's symbolic logic. Finally, I present the theory of functional concepts developed by Cassirer (1910) in the book Substance and Function as a prerequisite for the conception of a plural but systematic philosophy of symbolic forms.

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作为方法的批判唯心主义：恩斯特·卡西尔和象征形式哲学


为了纪念恩斯特·卡西尔的《符号形式哲学》一百周年，本文重点讨论卡西尔在发展独特的哲学方法时如何分析哲学和科学的最新发展。通过讨论爱因斯坦的相对论和罗素的形式逻辑，卡西尔找到了将理性批判扩展到文化批判的工具。论证过程如下。卡西尔在 1920 年出版的《爱因斯坦相对论》一书中对符号形式哲学的思想概述一开始就是对理论物理与普通经验之间距离日益拉大的反应。 《象征形式哲学》可以被解读为对批判唯心主义内部方法论要求的回答。我在卡西尔的评论中围绕着这个主题，即柏拉图的唯心主义，被理解为思想的唯心主义，在康德的先验哲学和赫尔曼·科恩对康德的接受中得到了重申。这引发了关于卡西尔如何通过接受罗素符号逻辑而摆脱科恩的讨论。最后，我提出了卡西尔（Cassirer，1910）在《物质与功能》一书中提出的功能概念理论，作为多元但系统的符号形式哲学概念的先决条件。