A normative dimension in the ethical turn of Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture

• Grant number: 23/18244-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2024
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Rafael Rodrigues Garcia
• Grantee: Leonardo Nascimento Pança
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 22/03210-5 - Ernst Cassirers late philosophical program: the legacy of the symbolic in the construction of the common world, AP.PNGP.PI
• Associated scholarship(s): 25/00906-7 - Emancipation in Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

This research project is a proposal for understanding and mapping the 'ethical turn' in Ernst Cassirer's philosophical program of the symbolic. This involves grasping the practical dimension of the philosophy of culture in its potential for constructing an ethical normativity for the program of symbolic forms. In the first part, we will seek to understand Cassirer's ethical turn during his exile, based on the primacy of the worldly or cosmopolitan dimension of philosophy, whose ideal center is guided by ethical ideals, especially the doctrine of natural rights as human rights, throughout the philosopher's work. In the second part of the research, we aim to comprehend the expansion of the program of symbolic forms in the ethical turn, drawing from Axel Hägerström's work (1939). In this section, we emphasize the moral dimension of the philosophy of culture, as well as the establishment of law as a symbolic form. Thus, this part aims to understand the implications for the ethical turn of incorporating objects from practical philosophy into the philosophical program of the symbolic. In the third part of the research, our objective is to understand the possibility of a normative dimension of the philosophy of culture as it unfolds in Cassirer's mature and posthumous works. This part seeks to comprehend the transformation of symbolic foundations into a plural and open concept of natural rights as human rights through the transformation of the image of humanity (with the notion of 'animal symbolicum'), as well as the centrality of the concept of freedom and human spontaneity in its process of progressive self-liberation embedded in culture, as responses or limits to the danger of the reactive side of political myths. The central question of this research aims to investigate whether, and to what extent, Cassirer opened up a normative space for the philosophy of culture for ethical judgments and, thereby, for the establishment of the task of constructing and reconstructing a concrete ethical praxis for philosophy.