for those who aren't scholars. Having read it, matters are a bit clearer, but not much. The start is good. There is, Cassirer declares, a ``crisis in man's knowledge of himself.'' I dare say it takes a philosopher, perhaps even a German philosopher, to deem the absence of an adequate and generally accepted philosophical anthropology a ``crisis,'' but this dramatization is harmless, and Cassirer has a real point. No former age was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astonishingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nevertheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material.... Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity. [End of ch. 1]Slightly more Englishly: it'd help if we had a big picture about what people are like, and why they are that way. What Cassirer set out to do was to master the actual facts of the relevant particular sciences (in which, very soundly, he included biology, logic, mathematics and physics, in addition to those in the quotation above), and to produce a synthesis, a body of general doctrine about human beings and human culture in light of which the discoveries of the sciences, and the existence of the sciences, would make sense. It was an ambitious and worthwhile undertaking, though Cassirer was engagingly modest about it: note that his subtitle says a philosophy of culture, not the. There is also a pleasing whiff of the Enlightenment about the project (and, of course, th...
