Myth, Symbol and Reality


Book Description

Do myths and symbols have anything at all to tell us about reality? Or do they simply deserve to be relegated to the realm of fantastic unreality? The essayists in this volume deploy all the critical tools available in the task of taking myth and symbol seriously. They are not willing to consign the use of the symbolic to the logician or to relinquish the mythical to the comparative anthropologist as something of historical interest only. Instead, they strive for that difficult position that is guided by criticism but is still open to wonder in the face of what myth and symbol offer in terms of enrichment, meaning, and self-transcendence.




Symbolism and Reality


Book Description

Charles W. Morris' doctoral thesis Symbolism and Reality, written in 1925 at Chicago under George H. Mead, has never before been published. It sets out to prove that thought and mind are not entities, nor even processes involving a psychical substance distinguishable from the rest of reality, but are explicable as the functioning of parts of the experience as symbols to an organism of other parts of experience. Being then the symbolic portion of experience, the psychical or mental can neither be sharply opposed to the rest of experience nor identical with the whole of experience. This edition includes a preface by Achim Eschbach, an extensive bibliography of Morris' works, and indices of names and subjects.




Symbol and Reality


Book Description

Since prefaces, for the most part, are written after a book is done, yet face the reader before he gets to it, it is perhaps not surprising that we usually find ourselves addressed by a more chastened and qualifying author than we eventually encounter in the ensuing pages. It is, after all, not only some readers, but the writer of a book himself who reads what he has done and failed to do. If the above is the rule, I am no exception to it. The discerning reader need not be told that the following studies differ, not only in the approaches they make to their unifying subject-matter, but also in their precision and thus adequacy of presentation. In addition to the usual reasons for this rather common shortcoming, there is an another one in the case of the present book. In spite of its comparative brevity, the time-span between its inception and termination covers some twenty years. As a result, some (historical and epistemological) sections reflect my preoccupation with CASSI RER'S eady works during student days in Germany and France. When, some ten years later, CASSIRER in a letter expressed "great joy" and anticipation for a more closely supervised con tinuation of my efforts (which, because of his untimely death, never came to pass), he gave me all the encouragement needed to go to work on a critical exposition of his "symbolic form" con cept.




Truth and Symbol


Book Description

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Symbol and Existence


Book Description




Tao of Philosophy


Book Description

The Tao of Philosophy is a literary adaptation of talks selected to introduce the new "Love of Wisdom" series by Alan Watts to today's audiences. The following chapters provide rich examples of the way in which the philosophy of the Tao is as contemporary today as it was when it flourished in China thousands of years ago. Perhaps most significantly, these selections offer modern society a clearer understanding of what it will take for a successful reintegration of humans in nature.




Ernst Cassirer


Book Description

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.




Rethinking Symbolism


Book Description

"The main thrust of this book is to deliver a major critique of materialist and rationalist explanations of social and cultural forms, but the in the process Sahlins has given us a much stronger statement of the centrality of symbols in human affairs than have many of our 'practicing' symbolic anthropologists. He demonstrates that symbols enter all phases of social life: those which we tend to regard as strictly pragmatic, or based on concerns with material need or advantage, as well as those which we tend to view as purely symbolic, such as ideology, ritual, myth, moral codes, and the like. . . ."—Robert McKinley, Reviews in Anthropology




The Social Construction of Reality


Book Description

A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.




The Symbolic Construction of Reality


Book Description

In 1933 eminent philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) fled Nazi Germany for the United States. His fame in Europe having already been established through a public debate with Martin Heidegger in 1929, Cassirer would go on to become a noteworthy influence on American culture. His most important early writings focused on the symbol and symbolic interaction, exploring how human cultures—from early myth-based ones to our own modern, scientifically oriented time—have used symbols to mediate the basic forms of experience. Following this work, Cassirer extended his insights to encompass a broad spectrum of philosophical themes: from investigations into Western epistemological and scientific traditions to aesthetics and the philosophy of history to anthropology and political philosophy. Reflecting this diversity in Cassirer’s own work, The Symbolic Construction of Reality collects eleven essays by a wide range of contributors from different fields. Each essay analyzes a different aspect of his legacy, reassessing its significance for our contemporary world and bringing much-needed attention to this seminal thinker.