Symbolism And Reality

Charles W. Morris' doctoral thesis Symbolism and Reality, written in 1925 at Chicago under George H. Mead, has never before been published. It sets out to prove that thought and mind are not entities, nor even processes involving a psychical substance distinguishable from the rest of reality, but are explicable as the functioning of parts of the experience as symbols to an organism of other parts of experience. Being then the symbolic portion of experience, the psychical or mental can neither be sharply opposed to the rest of experience nor identical with the whole of experience. This edition includes a preface by Achim Eschbach, an extensive bibliography of Morris' works, and indices of names and subjects.

Combined here in one volume are two books, The Crisis of Religious Symbolism and Symbolism and Reality. Although published seven years apart, these two works are integral to one another. Symbolism and Reality represents a kind of sabbath rest--its subtitle says "reflection"--after the mighty works of The Crisis of Religious Symbolism, where the deep structures of three hundred years of Western philosophical and cultural development are brought to the surface, analyzed, and made meaningful in the light of what Jean Borella has termed "the metaphysics of the symbol." Together, these two books represent a cleansing and restoration of a Christian vision of the world. Through Jean Borella's witness to the death and resurrection of religious symbolism presented here, we are given entrance to a world renewed in Christ. "Borella's writing shines with wayside jewels of intuition, as well as proceeding with a rich vein of theological reasoning."--Malachi Martin The French Catholic religious philosopher Jean Borella (b. 1930) taught metaphysics and the history of ancient and medieval philosophy at the University of Nancy II until his retirement in 1995. Besides the present works on sacred symbology, he has also written important texts on charity, analogy, Christian gnosis, mystical theology, and sacred exegesis. His latest work is To the Biblical Sources of Metaphysics (2015).

In 1933 eminent philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874 - 1945) fled Nazi Germany for the United States. His fame in Europe having already been established through a public debate with Martin Heidegger in 1929, Cassirer would go on to become a noteworthy influence on American culture. His most important early writings focused on the symbol and symbolic...

Since prefaces, for the most part, are written after a book is done, yet face the reader before he gets to it, it is perhaps not surprising that we usually find ourselves addressed by a more chastened and qualifying author than we eventually encounter in the ensuing pages. It is, after all, not only some readers, but the writer of a book himself who reads what he has done and failed to do. If the above is the rule, I am no exception to it. The discerning reader need not be told that the following studies differ, not only in the approaches they make to their unifying subject-matter, but also in their precision and thus adequacy of presentation. In addition to the usual reasons for this rather common shortcoming, there is an another one in the case of the present book. In spite of its comparative brevity, the time-span between its inception and termination covers some twenty years. As a result, some (historical and epistemological) sections reflect my preoccupation with CASSI RER'S eady works during student days in Germany and France. When, some ten years later, CASSIRER in a letter expressed "great joy" and anticipation for a more closely supervised con tinuation of my efforts (which, because of his untimely death, never came to pass), he gave me all the encouragement needed to go to work on a critical exposition of his "symbolic form" con cept.

First published in 2002. This is Volume XV of seventeen in the Library of Philosophy series on Metaphysics. Written in 1939, this book looks at Language and Reality and the Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism and is related to the movement of Logical Positivism, initiated by Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.