This is supposed to be a classic, but like all classics, I eventually ran out of steam. I did OK until the last chapter on aesthetic problems and then the reading seemed to take forever. Cassirer is at pains to show that the enlightenment of 18th century thought is quite a bit different, although heir to, seventeenth century thought, which culminated, really, with Newton. Newton was the culmination of thought begun with Bacon, Kepler, Galileo and Spinoza. Newton formulates the observations of others into mathematical laws wholly devoid of authority and revelation.
But in discovering the natural world, the new empiricism really discovers the mind, and in so doing, begins to criticize itself. If there is no guarantee of the uniformity of nature and experience, then how do we know what we know? It leads thence to Hume and to Kant. "What we call objectivity or truth or necessity has no absolute but merely a relative meaning." (p. 115)
In essence, the Enlightenment was about attitude, or as the essay once said, freeing man from the horse latitudes of faith. And yet it runs into it's own issues of epistemology even while seeing "from the advancement of knowledge a new moral order and a new orientation of the political and social history of man." (p. 214) Quite a tall order, but the foundation of all of our thinking. Diderot was characteristic in rejecting all conceptual schemes and seeking a dynamic view of the world in which present knowledge is but a transitory view or a "resting point" to be overturned as new knowledge becomes available.
Author: Cassier, Ernst
Date Published: 1932
Length: 360 pp
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