Ernst Cassirer: Science, Symbols, and Logics John W.

Mohr Department of Sociology University of California, Santa Barbara

[email protected]

To appear in Christofer Edling and Jens Rydgren (Eds.), Sociological Insights of Great Thinkers: Sociology through Literature, Philosophy, and Science. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2010 (in press).

Draft Version 57, (3/8/10) Word Count 4794 (text 4,044; references 750)

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a prominent German philosopher, intellectual historian, and one of the first modern, systematic theorists of cultural studies. Although he sometimes addressed political and sociological topics, his influence on contemporary sociological theory is largely indirect. Cassirer is mainly important to sociology because of the position that he occupied in the German intellectual field at a critical historical juncture, the way he addressed the research problems at hand, and the influence that he had on a subsequent generation of scholars who went on to create their own influential theoretical programs in the cultural and social sciences. Three of Cassirers ideas are particularly relevant to the concerns of sociologists his distinction between substantialism and relationalism (as developed in his writings on science), his conceptualization of cultural analysis (as worked out under the framework of his various studies of cultural fields) and his approach to understanding institutional logics as discursive systems (as expressed in his efforts to construct a general philosophy of symbolic forms).1 Cassirers Life Cassirer was born into a prominent Jewish family in Breslau, Germany in 1874. His cousins included the publisher Bruno Cassirer, the art collector Paul Cassirer, and the pioneering Gestalt psychologist Kurt Goldstein (Skidelsky, 2008, p.3). He was a twenty year old literature student at the University of Berlin when, seeking more depth of understanding, he began to attending Georg Simmels course on Kant. Simmel, who was at the time, an acclaimed Privatdozent teaching in the philosophy department, encouraged Cassirer to read the work of Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and, not insignificantly, the first Jewish intellectual to hold a professorship in Germany (Friedman, 2000, p. 4). Simmel emphasized how much he

I have relied extensively on a number of excellent Cassirer commentaries including: Verene,

(1966, 2008), Krois (1987), Friedman (2000), Lofts (2000), Bayer (2001), Skidelsky (2008) and the papers in Barash (2008).

himself owed to the study of Cohen's books, but he immediately added that those books, in spite of their real sagacity and profundity, suffered from a very grave defect. They were written, he said, in such an obscure style that as yet there was probably no one who had succeeded in deciphering them (Cassirer, 1943, p. 222). Cassirer embraced this challenge and moved to Marburg to take his Ph.D. with Cohen. By all accounts he was an extraordinary student. Gawronsky (1949) reports that Cassirer read prodigiously, had a photographic memory, was a relentless workaholic, and possessed an unusual facility with languages. For his dissertation, Cassirer chose a topic of central concern to Cohen, the relationship between the Kantian theory of knowledge and the modern natural sciences. In a style that would go on to characterize all of his future work, Cassirer approached the problem through the lens of intellectual history. His project had two parts. The first (on Descartes), he submitted for his doctorate in 1899, the second, (on Leibniz), Cassirer entered into the Berlin Academy competition in 1901 (which he won). The two parts were published (together) in 1902 as a general treatise on Leibnizs philosophy of science. In spite of this acclaim and the obvious brilliance of his work, faculty employment was scarce, especially for Jewish scholars, and so Cassirer lived for many years as an independent intellectual in Berlin. During this period he wrote a number of important works that made him quite famous. In 1906, he too became a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin (thanks to the personal intervention of Wilhelm Dilthey) but it was not until 1919 that he was offered a faculty appointment (a professorship) from the newly founded (post-war and progressive) University of Hamburg.2 In the next phase of his career Cassirer flourished he wrote all three volumes of his signature work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923, 1925, 1928) (as well as a great deal more) and came to be regarded as one of the most significant philosophers in the country. He was made rector of his university in 1929 (the first Jew to hold such a position in Germany, Friedman, 2000, p. 4), the same year that he participated in a famous public debate with

Ringer describes the difficulties facing Jewish intellectuals at this moment in German history.

Even Simmel was not granted a regular faculty appointment until 1914, four years before he died (1968:136).

Martin Heidegger (in Davos). But when Hitler came to power (in 1933), Cassirer quickly left Germany (never to return). He taught at Oxford for two years, moved to the University of Goeteborg (Sweden), and finally (in 1941) to the United States, as a visiting Professor, first at Yale, then at Columbia. He died of a heart attack in New York City in 1945, three weeks before the allied victory in Europe. Substantialism or Relationalism? How to theorize a science of the social Many sociologists will recognize Cassirers name from the writings of Pierre Bourdieu who cited him frequently, most often with reference to Cassirers distinction between substantialism and relationalism. On the first page of Practical Reason, a latecareer collection of essays geared to show what I believe to be most essential in my work (1998, p. vii), Bourdieu says that there are really just two fundamental qualities that define his approach, a specific philosophy of action (articulated in his inter-related suite of concepts field, habitus, capital, etc.) and a particular philosophy of science that one could call relational in that it accords primacy to relations. (p.vii). Bourdieu explains, I refer hereto the opposition suggested by Ernst Cassirer between substantial concepts and functional or relational concepts (p.3). Bourdieu describes relationalism as the philosophical style of the modern natural sciences and, also, as the grounding for his own (distinctive) research program. He says: this philosophy is only rarely brought into play in the social sciences, undoubtedly because it is very directly opposed to the conventions of ordinary (or semi-scholarly) thought about the social world, which is more readily devoted to substantial realities such as individuals and groups than to the objective relations which one cannot show, but which must be captured, constructed and validated through scientific work. (1998 p.vii) Thus, Bourdieu sees himself as crafting a relational science of the social which is necessary to penetrate beneath the surface appearance of things, to move to a deeper level of understanding, down to the objective relations that serve as, the structuring structures of the social world. But why is it that Bourdieu thinks that we can only

achieve genuine understanding if we embrace relationalism, and what exactly does he mean by the term? To answer these questions, it is helpful to go back to Cassirer. In his classic text, Substance and Function (SaF), Cassirer introduced the distinction between substantialism and relationalism, defining them as two different modes of scientific thinking, grounded in two different logics. Substantialism is the more traditional of the two. It begins with Aristotle but variations live on in scientific theories for centuries afterwards. Over all that time, the actual center of gravity of the system had not changed (p.4). In other words, for Cassirer there is a deep level, in the logic itself, the set of structuring structures, that shape how scientific theories are assembled. It is this core logic that remains stable, even as different theories come and go. In this respect, Cassirers project bears a similarity to Foucaults (1970) analysis of an episteme as the apparatus which permits separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable withina field of scientificity, and (thus)what may (or) may not be characterized as scientific (1980 p.197). Like Foucault, Cassirer is not interested in the content of specific theories, so much as the logical form according to which statements within those theories come to be perceived as rational.3 The logic of substantialism assumes that abstraction occurs in the sorting of things, according to common features, into taxonomic hierarchies, as species and genus. Just as we form the concept of a tree by selecting from the totality of oaks, beaches and birch trees, the group of common properties, so, in exactly the same way, we form the concept of a plane rectangular figure by isolating the common properties which are found in the square, the right angle, rhomboidwhich can be immediately seen and pointed out (p.5). It is thus by the mental act of comparison that abstract thought (and, by implication, scientific knowledge) is generated, it is by (r)eflection, which passes hither
3

Did Foucault read Cassirer? As a graduate student Foucault had translated one of Kants later

works into French and provided a commentary (Foucault, 2008). Because Cassirer edited Kants collected works and provided many classic commentaries, Foucault certainly knew some of Cassirers writings, but whether he had read Cassirers substantive work, I cannot tell. At one point, White (1973) reports that Foucault indicated an affinity for the thought of the late Ernst Cassirer (p. 25), but of course there were also vast differences between them. Cassirer was the quintessential modernist, and Foucault, the classic post-modernist.

and thither among the particular objects in order to determine the essential features in which they agree (p.5). As a logic for analysis, this has some merit because (i)ts presuppositions are simple and clear; and they agree so largely with theordinary view of the worldthat they seem to offer no foothold for criticism (p.4). But what is necessarily highlighted in this approach is an essentialism, a focus on the giveness, the reification of things as they appear in the world and this justifies the pursuit of the elemental substances from which the thing of the world are fashioned. (T)he determination of the concept according to its next higher genusreproduces the process by which the real substance successively unfolds itself and its special forms of being (p. 7). Thus, (t)he biological species signifies both the end toward which the living individual strives and the immanent force by which its evolution is guided (p.7). In other words, our logics both enable and constrain us. For substantialists (q)uantity and quality, space and time determinations, do not exist in and for themselves, but merely as properties of absolute realities which exist by themselves (p. 8). While such a system may be suited to the descriptive and classifying natural sciences, this logic was a brake on the advance of other kinds of science and mathematics itself. Drawing on close readings of the history of science, Cassirer suggests that a new logic of analysis, explicitly modeled on mathematical rationality, begins to emerge among scientists as early as the Renaissance. This alternate approach finds its footing when some scholars refuse the questions imposed by conventional (substantialist) thought. Galileo avoided the question as to the cause of weight and Robert Mayer, famous for his pronouncement that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, says of his own project, I do not know what heat, electricity etc. are in their inner essence just as little as I know the inner essence of a material substance or of anything in general; I know this, however, that I see the connection of many phenomena much more clearly than has hitherto been seen, and that I can give a clear and good notion of what a force is (p.139-140). In contrast to Aristotelian analysis that does not change the constitution of consciousness and of objective reality, but merely institutes certain limits and divisions in it, (p.14) the new logic expands abstraction outwards, away from the knowledge of particulars toward generalized principles of understanding. 6

In this style of thinking the world of sensible thingsis not so much reproduced as transformed and supplanted by an order of another sort (p.14). It is (t)his transformation, this change into a new form of logical being, (that) constitutes the real positive achievement of abstraction (p.22-23). Verene explains the philosophical significance of this insight: Cassirer realizes that the concept of the mathematical function shows with complete clarity what philosophy has long been seeking the inseparability of the universal and the particular achieved through their mutual determinations (Verene, p. 2008, p. 97). Function-concepts make explicit use of mathematical principles, but the most refined expressions of this logic are those cast in purely relational terms. Relationality in this sense implies a theory of the whole and its parts according to which the meaning of the thing is given in its relatedness to the whole. No doubt Cassirers connection to Simmel, Cohen, and the Gestalt theorists, his own studies of Leibniz, as well as his grasp of turn of the century mathematics and physics all contributed to his presumption that, we first have true knowledge when we survey the total movement of the process as a purposively ordered whole. We must understand how one element demands another; how all the threads are mutually interwoven finally into one web, to form a single order of the phenomena of nature (Page 133). About the time that SaF was first published (1910), Kurt Lewin was a young graduate student in psychology at the University of Berlin where he attended Privatdozent Cassirers lectures on the philosophy of science. Lewin was another brilliant, underemployed Jewish intellectual. He was wounded in the war, completed his Ph.D. under Stumpf, had close ties to the Frankfurt school, and like Cassirer, left Germany in 1933. Unlike Cassirer, however, Lewin went almost immediately to the United States where he built a successful academic career and became an important, if iconoclastic, leader in the field of American social psychology. In his tribute essay, Lewin notes that in the 40 years that he had known Cassirer, scarcely a year passed when I did not have specific reason to acknowledge the help which Cassirers views on the nature of science and research offered, (1949, p.272). Certainly the parallels in their projects are striking. Lewin, for example, published an essay (1935) in which he sought to apply Cassirrers ideas about the two styles of scientific logic (The Aristotelian and 7

The Galoliean) to understand his own academic field. In that piece, and later as he worked on developing his own field theoretic approach to social science, Lewin focused wholeheartedly on the development of a genuinely relational approach to social science. Lewin had arrived in the United States just as quantitative styles of analysis were beginning to firmly take root in the American social sciences (Mohr & Rawlings, forthcoming; Platt, 1996). As Stevens (1959) notes, these were the years during which the business of pinning numbers on things(had)become a pandemic activity(where) the attitude seems to be: if it exists, measure it (p.18). Lewin was skeptical of much that he saw in this regard. Though he was fiercely committed to developing a scientific program of research, he was nonetheless convinced that his own discipline was hopelessly locked into susbtantialist styles of thinking, leading them to produce elaborate schemes for measuring thing-concepts, which, often as not, end up producing a well polished container of nothing (1949, p.272). Recalling Cassirers discussion of the history of physics and chemistry, Lewin notes that (s)ome of the present day theoretical problems in psychology show great methodological similarities to these controversies although they are historically separated by centuries (1951, p.30). Lewin set out to design his own system for measuring social psychological processes in a relational manner by following Einsteins notion of field space which he defined as the totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent (1951:240). Borrowing from topology theory, a branch of mathematics concerned with the formal analysis of relational systems, Lewin developed a mathematical system (he called hodological space) for examining models of the life space which he defined as the person and the psychological environment as it exists for him (1951:57). They included goals, stimuli, needs, social relations..., indeed, everything that affects behavior at a given time (1951:241), each represented as a region in the space, where the meaning of each region was defined by its location vis-vis the other regions within the life space. This was measurement without reference to metric extension or dimensional orientation. Here, Lewin cites Cassirer who points out again and again that mathematization is not identical with quantification. Mathematics handles quantity and quality. This is particularly apparent in those branches of geometry

which make non-quantitative but still mathematically exact statements in regard to position and other geometrical relations (Lewin, 1951:30-31). Still, Lewin ended rather like Cassirer. His own project on hodological measurement space disappeared after his death. But Lewins indirect influence was strong and widespread. Many of his students would go on to be leaders in social scienceLeon Festinger, Morton Deutsch, Richard Emerson all carried segments of Lewins ideas forward. Two of his students are especially relevant for sociology, Dorwin Cartwright and Alex Bavelas. Both were instrumental in decoupling Lewins ideas from the more complex hodological measurement system, and switching it over instead to a young branch of mathematics known as graph theory, thus creating some of the first mathematically precise approaches to the analysis of a social network (Mohr, forthcoming). Finally, there is Bourdieu. Building on Lewins field theory, Bourdieu crafted a project that probably represents the strongest active linkage between Cassirer and the practices of modern sociology. Notice how in Bourdieu relationalism accounts for cultural fields, it animates his approach to power as forms of capital, it defines his conception of interpretation as a semiotic process, and even dictates his use of formal methodologies. From The Critique of Pure Reason to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Beneath the study of science there are the problems of philosophy. For his part, Cassirers interest in modern physics was never innocent. He had written SaF as a way to preserve Kantian philosophy in the face of its imminent demise. Recall that Kant, near the end of the 18th century, among his other accomplishments, had resolved old debates (between empiricists and rationalists) concerning the nature of thought and the character of knowledge by arguing that the human mind provides fundamental ordering principles that are necessary for interpreting sensory data synthetic apriori qualities of mind that orient us to perceptual experiences of temporality, spatiality, causality, etc (Buroker, 2006). One goal of the Marburg school was to show that these ideas were not overly determining (defining fixed qualities of mind), so much as a theory about the minds capacity for symbolization that is also coupled to an existential experience of 9

embodiment. This was an important focus of philosophical dispute at the time. Positivists like Ernst Mach hoped to dismiss Kant as irrelevant by accusing him of smuggling an implicit metaphysics into philosophy and pointing to evidence from postNewtonian science that undermined Kants claims and about the universality of the categories of time and space. So, developments in 19th century mathematics showing that Euclidean Geometry, which corresponds to our bodily sense experience of space, was only a special case of a much broader set of mathematical systems built on entirely nonEuclidean assumptions were anomalies for the neo-Kantian paradigm. So were Einsteins theories showing that time itself had knowable qualities that were beyond embodied experience. Cassirers arguments in SaF were intended to rebut these critiques. This was a central theme of Cassirers career. He never wavered in his commitment to defending the core principles of Kantian philosophy, and especially the clear sense that the rational pursuit of knowledge could yield progress in both scientific understanding and ethical thought. And yet, the more deeply Cassirer became engaged by these pursuits the harder he worked at saving Kant the more he found himself maneuvering well beyond the bounds of any conventional neo-Kantianism. In SaF, but even more strikingly in the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer seeks to rebuild Kants critical philosophy by systematically substituting a theory of symbolization for a theory of mind or, as Verene puts it, with Cassirer, the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture (2000, p.vii). (I)nstead of defining man as an animal rationale, you should define him as an animal symbolicum says Cassirer (1944, p.26). And so, part of Cassirers original innovation in his work on science was to suggest that it is in the logic of symbols, not in the logic of mind, that the Kantian synthesis is accomplished. Thus scientists embrace of symbolic systems, energized by a logical core, specifies how they will notice, experience, and imagine the natural world. But this was just the beginning of Cassirers intellectual journey. By the time he had taken up his professorship at Hamburg, he had survived the First World War (doing propaganda analysis for the German government) and come to acknowledge (like so many of his age) that human societies were not necessarily governed by enlightened

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reason.4 It was surely symbolization that mattered, but, as Cassirer realized, symbolization comes in a wide variety of forms, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, math, art and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience (1944, p.25). Thus Cassirers mature project starts with his goal of conducting a broad-scale analysis of the primary symbolic domains of human societies. He follows Kant by critically examining each of the primary symbolic domains in terms of their characteristic forms. In this work, Cassirer developed the beginnings of a systematic interrogation of cultural systems. Indeed, as Caws (1988) notes, Cassirers work on The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms anticipates remarkably most of the insights and concerns of structuralism. The symbolic forms language, math, religion, art, and science represent for Cassirer the different modes in which human thought expresses the world to itself (p.16). On this, Ricoeur (1970) concurs, Let us do justice to Cassirer: he was the first to have posed the problem of the reconstruction of language. But these comments just serve to highlight the question of why Cassirer has been so little noticed in the history of structuralism and the cultural projects that grew from that stem. Noting Cassirers preference for the term symbol rather than sign, Caws suggests (only half in jest), that (h)ad it not been, in fact, for an unfortunate terminological choice, Ernst Cassirer would certainly now be recognized as the founder of philosophical structuralism (p.16). Of course, the matter is more complex. Ricoeur (1970) puts it simply. Cassirers problem was that he defined the concept of the symbol too broadly as the general function of mediation by which the mind or consciousness constructs all its universes of perception and discourse(p.10). For Ricoeur, this crosses a true dividing line: the distinction between univocal and plurivocal expressions. It is this distinction that creates the hermeneutic problem(p. 11). In other words, Ricoeur thinks that to effectively interpret symbolic forms, one must focus more specifically on the ways in which a systematic substitution occurs in the symbolic order.

In his last book, Cassirer (1946) argues that fascism was an expression of the return to mythic

forms of culture achieving dominance in the logic of the state.

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While Cassirers conception of symbolic forms took him down a somewhat different path from mainstream semiotic analysis, there are a number ways in which his approach to the distinctive qualities of specific symbolizing domains bore important fruit. Panofsky (1991) famously used Cassirers approach to describe the distinctive symbolic forms of architectural theory, and Suzanne Langer (1957) was able to do much the same with respect to her studies of music and the arts, arguing, for example, that the unique symbolic form of music enabled it to capture and express the forms of feelings that are incapable of being expressed linguistically. Langer acknowledges Cassirers influence explicitly on this work. She says, It was Cassirer though he never regarded himself as an aesthetician -- who hewed the keystone of the structure, in as broad and disinterested study of symbolic forms; and I, for my part, we put that stone in place, to join and sustain what so far we have built (1953, p.410). Conclusion: Form, Content, and Logic Here I have only begun to scratch the surface of the many ways that Cassirers thought has had an impact on the modern social sciences. First, as a theorist of science, Casssirer provided instructions for how to conduct effective research, and second as a theorist of culture where he developed a foundational grounding for modern structuralism and, hence, for much that has grown up in the field of cultural studies over this last century. Cassirers ideas have influenced other scholars whose work we now take for granted. There are many other examples that could be cited of scholars who were influenced by Cassirer. He was certainly known and read by other early structuralists including, for example, the Russian Formalists (Steiner, 1984), Bakhtin (1981) MerleuPonty (1998) to name but a few. There is also much more that could be said about, the relationship between Cassirers theory of discursive logic and the contemporary interest in studies of the cultural and institutional logics (Friedland, 2009). In this respect it is worth noting that there is a whole new part of Cassirers work that is beginning to come to light as the posthumously published fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1996) has now begun to attract the attention of scholars (Bayer, 2001; Verene, 2008). Here the most interesting news is Cassirers apparent turn in these last works

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toward developing a more elaborate theory of practice and to the sense of the interconnections of mind and body, logic and institution.

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References Bakhtin, M.M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barash, Jeffrey A. (ed). 2008. The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bayer, Thora Ilin. 2001. Cassirers Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1998. Practical Reason: On The Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Buroker, Jill Vance. 2006. Kants Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1943. Hermann Cohen, 1842-1918. Social Research, 10:1/4 p.219-232. Cassirer, Ernst. 1944. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1946. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1953 [1910]. Substance and Function. (Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff) Translated by William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey. New York: Dover. Cassirer, Ernst. 1953 [1923]. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 1: Language. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1955 [1925]. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 2: Mythical Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Cassirer, Ernst. 1957 [1929]. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1996. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Caws P. 1988. Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Int. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 2008 [1964]. Introduction to Kants Anthropology. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Friedland, Roger. (2009). Institution, Practice and Ontology: Towards A Religious Sociology. in Ideology and Organizational Institutionalism, (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 27), Renate Meyer, Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson, Marc Ventresca, Peter Walgenbach (eds). Friedman, Michael. 2000. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Chicago: Open Court. Gawronsky, Dimitry. 1949. Cassirer: His Life and his Work. Pp. 3-37 in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. Evanston, IL: The Library of Living Philosophers. Krois, John Michael. 1987. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Langer, Susanne K., 1953. Feeling and Form. NY: Charles Scribners Sons.

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Langer, Suzanne. 1957. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Lewin, Kurt. 1935 [1931]. The Conflict Between Aristotelian and Galileian Modes of Thought in Contemporary Psychology. Pp. 1-42 in A Dynamic Theory of Personality: Selected Papers of Kurt Lewin. New York.: McGraw, Hill. Lewin, Kurt. 1949. Cassirer's Philosophy of Science and the Social Sciences. Pp. 269288 in Paul Arthur Schilpp (Ed.) The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers. Lewin, Kurt. 1951. Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper. Lofts, S. G. 2000. Ernst Cassirer: A Repetition of Modernity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1998. [1962]. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Mohr, John W. Forthcoming. Implicit Terrains: Meaning, Measurement, and Spatial Metaphors in Organizational Theory. The Economic Sociology of Markets and Industries, Marc Ventresca, Kamal A. Munir and Michael Lounsbury (eds.), Cambridge University Press. Mohr, John W. and Craig Rawlings. Forthcoming. Formal Models of Culture. Forthcoming in A Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by Laura Grindstaff, John Hall and Ming-cheng Lo. Routledge. Panofsky, Erwin. 1991 [1927]. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books. Platt, Jennifer. 1996. A History of Sociological Research Methods in America: 1920 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.

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Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ringer, Fritz K. 1990. [1969]. The Decline of the German Mandarins: the German Academic Community, 18901933. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Skidelsky, Edward. 2008. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Steiner, Peter. 1984. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Cornell,New York: Cornell University press. Stevens, S.S. 1959. Measurement, Psychophysics, and Utility. pages 18-63 in a Measurement: Definitions and Theories. New York: Wiley. Verene, Donald Phillip. 1966. Cassirers View of Myth and Symbol. The Monist vol. 50(4): 553-564. Verene, Donald Phillip. 2000. Foreword. Pp.vii-ix in, Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. New Haven: Yale University Press. Verene, Donald Phillip. 2008. Cassirers Metaphysics. Page 93 103 in The Symbolic Construction of Reality: the Legacy of Ernst Cassirer. Edited by Jeffrey Andrew Barash. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. White, Hayden. 1973. Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground. History and Theory, Vol. 12, No. 1:23-54.

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