Ernst Cassirer : La vita della forma. Scritti su Schiller

Abstract

The volume presents, for the first time in Italian translation, three Cassirer essays devoted to Schiller—The Method of Idealism in Schiller’s Philosophical Writings (1921), Schiller’s Philosophical World‑View (a cycle of public lectures from the 1920/21 academic year), and Schiller and Shaftesbury (1935)—preceded by a Preface by Chiara Russo Krauss and an introductory essay by Luigi Laino that reconstructs their context, sources, and theoretical import. Conceived within the PRIN 2022 project “The Neo‑Kantian Reception of Schiller between Platonism and Kantianism,” the book documents the zenith of Schiller’s influence on the Marburg School. The underlying motif of Cassirer’s idealism is, in fact, closely bound to Schiller’s reworking of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, mediating between spontaneity and receptivity, spirit and nature. To know is always to give form to matter, and thus epistemology and aesthetics appear as two sides of the same coin. The volume’s title, which alludes to the “life of form,” captures this crucial intersection.