Oy, Chuck, it's just gossip about gossip. Are you sure you care? Here you go: ..... Michael Pollak
This does have some interest for the history of the Frankfurt School. Also, I find Cassirer interesting, and wonder if other list participants have any thoughts about him. Christopher Dÿkema
...but apropos translation and Adorno, I've decided to take on The Beast, a.k.a. "Negative Dialectics". Four hundred pages, no brakes, a translation to mark the millenium.... Dennis Redmond
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Awesome, Michael. Thanks. You know, I never in my wildest dreams considered taking German, having barely passed Spanish, French, and Italian. I didn't know at twenty that Germany had some of the best art, philosophy, and intellectual history writing in the world---or that somebody like me would care. Thanks again. I am terrible at languages.
But Dennis R., this is great news. Really, post that sucker. I have to admit, I got thoroughly bored with Adorno's ND and his endless diatribe on Heidegger. I mean I didn't like Heidegger in the first place---overly elaborated sour, dark, void, cold passage after passage.
For Christopher Dykema, yes I am very interested in Cassirer and have gotten through a fair amount of him. I just ordered a hardback copy of vol 3 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms from alibrus. He wrote a very large amount of work. What makes him difficult is that he elaborates his own view through an analysis of other philosophers, which is a kind of scholarly way to go about it---but that makes it difficult to clearly separate out his own system of thought. I've had to go back and find things in Kant or Hegel in order to see where Cassirer is going. I am sitting here reading Carl Hamburg's essay on him, to refresh my memory (Conception of Philosophy, from Library of Living Philosophers, the Philosophy of Ernest Cassirer, Open Court, 1949)
In the twenties, Cassirer and Heidegger were competing to establish a kind of German philosophical take on Modernity and the currents of early 20c thought. They had a famous debate in Davos (1929?), which I haven't read. When Hitler came to power, Cassirer immediately resigned his post in Marburg, and took the job at Oxford, mentioned in the translated post. He then made arrangements to have the Warburg library moved to England to keep it from a likely nazis destruction. The English art historian EH Gombrich later took it over [which intellectually was a damn shame. Gombrich was a friend of Popper's and made it his duty to erase the evil Hegelian influence from the archives of english art history writing---stupid twit---of course on the theory that art history should be objective scholarship and not contaminated by romantic rubbish, frump, frump, here, here--kiss my ass EH. What a master of writing about art with nothing to say.... Unfortunately, it was Gombrick and not Cassirer or Hauser who was used in my introductory art history courses---back when (60s). But I digress.]
It's possible that Cassirer couldn't get Adorno a position, since later Cassirer was invited to Sweden and took an academic position in Stockholm on the condition that nobody was displaced in the department. So, judging from that, it might have been that Cassirer's position in Oxford was given him, at the expense of somebody else---and he felt bad about it. I don't really know of course. By 1941, Cassirer took the last boat from Sweden to the US and ended up first at Yale and later Columbia. Swedish neutrality, might have pissed him off, since he immigrated as a swedish citizen. He died in April of 1945.
But Christopher D, argue something or write about Cassirer, otherwise I'll just go off on a rant... I think Cassirer is one of the most interesting and best philosophers I've ever read. Even if you are not that interested in him, you will learn a great deal, because he covers a tremendous range. He must have been a fabulous teacher.
Chuck Grimes