Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology : Contemporary Readings by Aud Sissel Hoel and Ingvild Folkvord, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.

ISBN-10 : 0230365477 ISBN-13 : 978-0230365476.

Cassirer's thought-provoking essay Form and Technology (1930) considers the theoretical work performed by material instruments and, in so doing, it ascribes to technology a new dignity as a genuine tool of the mind in equal company with language and art. Germinating in this essay, we find an ambitious program for a new kind of philosophy of technology that resonates with contemporary approaches focusing on material apparatuses, relational and performative processes, and the embodied, embedded, and enacted nature of perception and cognition. Cassirer's approach, however, is unique in the way that it integrates logical concerns, championed by scientifically oriented philosophers, with the concerns of the historical and cultural sciences. The current revival of interest in Cassirer's thinking has precisely to do with its potential for bridging unproductive intellectual gaps. Form and Technology, especially, provides a rich resource for current attempts, across disciplines, to develop new conceptual and ontological frameworks. Cassirer's classic essay, translated here into English for the first time, is accompanied by ten critical essays that explore its current relevance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Aud Sissel Hoel and Ingvild Folkvord

PART 1 FORM AND TECHNOLOGY

1 Form and Technology

Ernst Cassirer

(translated by Wilson McClelland Dunlavey and John Michael Krois)

2 The Age of Complete Mechanization

John Michael Krois

PART II CONTEMPORARY READINGS

3 Technics of Thinking

Aud Sissel Hoel

4 The Struggle of Titans - Ernst Jünger and Ernst Cassirer : Vitalist and Enlightment Philosophies of technology in Weimar Germany

Frederik Stjernfelt

5 Technology as destiny in Cassirer and Heidegger : Continuing the Davos Debate

Hans Ruin

6 Technical Activity as a Symbolic Form : Comparing Money and Language

Jean Lassègue

7 The Power of Voice : Ernst Cassirer and Bertolt Brecht on Technology, Expressivity and Democracy

Ingvild Folkvord

8 'Representation' and 'Presence' in the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer

Marion Lauschke (translated by Wilson McClelland Dunlavey)

9 Cultural Poetics and the Politics of Literature

Frederik Tygstrup and Isak Winkel Holm (translated by Lise Utne)

10 Cave Art as Symbolic Form

Mats Rosengren

11 Failures of Convergence

Dennis M. Weiss

Index

Aud Sissel Hoel
Aud Sissel Hoel

Ingvild Folkvord
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