The importance of reading this book lies in the originality with which the author stands before an old Socratic question: What is man?. The answer can not be understood as a single, but as a cluster of themes that express the various dimensions of what is just human, and that in this work are treated in a concise but powerful. For the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) man is a symbolic animal , and various human expressions that come to shape our understanding of culture are just symbolic systems differ in their articulation, their complexity and their references: between symbolic systems we find the idea of \u200b\u200btime, myth, religion, language, art, history and science. The different disciplines are linked by a common origin and a structure capable of filtering very noticeable and reinvent it, to give meaning and leave it at hand, seizable and susceptible to change. Cassirer addresses the problem of human knowledge by reviewing the tenets of other philosophical, and says that the Aristotelian conception of man as rational animal, while correct, is insufficient to define it. Rationality is the common denominator of all acts which we define as human, as it would the human capacity to symbolize.
Philosophical Anthropology (336 pp. FCE, 1945) but explained relatively simply and it is not only a book for specialists and philosophers should be read slowly. Further development of the ideas expressed here can be found in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms the same author (3 volumes).
