Krytyka kultury jako teoria racjonalności. Wokół Filozofii form symbolicznych Ernsta Cassirera

The publication of the first, comprehensive Polish translation of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of symbolic forms raises the question about the validity of the research project presented in this work. The author of the paper claims that Cassirer created a coherent research program that can be read as a very interesting theory of the crisis of culture understood as the fundamental moment of the manifestation of human rationality, without which human culture-forming activity would not be possible at all. From this perspective, the crisis of culture - one of the leading threads in the humanities and social thought in the period between the First and Second World Wars - is not identical with the decline of Western culture, but should be treated as a starting point for a critical theory of rationality, which can also be applied within the perspective of the contemporary philosophy of culture.