The Symbolic Construction of Reality

These essays focus upon the conflict between myth and enlightenment in the modern political world. This theme, so important in Cassirer’s later writings, has been largely overlooked in favor of purely theoretical readings of his philosophy. This collection corrects this view and shows that Cassirer’s approach to this topic offers a key to his thinking. The essays show that this topic has lost none of its relevance and that the opposition between Cassirer and Heidegger, which appears in a variety of sometimes unexpected constellations in the essays, was more than a matter of theoretical interpretation