The famous story of the choice of Hercules became one frequently depicted in Western art and, as Ernst Panofsky showed, the various treatments of this theme demonstrate the significance of cultural continuity through the centuries. At the same time, the motif of Hercules and his choice presents us with a challenge to current theoretical approaches to culture. We can either take the easy path and accept the current hermeneutic orthodoxies of popular cultural studies, or we can choose a harder but, ultimately, more rewarding path: the philosophy of culture articulated by Ernst Cassirer. This...

As a central part of his philosophy of symbolic forms as a form of religious expression, and as a political problematic the question of myth belongs at the heart of Ernst Cassirers intellectual enterprise. Using a variety of methodological and conceptual approaches, these papers examine the persistence of myth as a symbolic form from a variety of perspectives: philosophical, anthropological, psychological, political, and historico-cultural. In its way each paper attempts, in Cassirers phrase, to see the adversary face to face.

Published by Maney on behalf of the Centre for Intercultural Studies, Department of German Language and Literature, University of Glasgow.
Inaugurated with a collection of 'intercultural readings' of Goethe on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of his birth, the series Cultural Studies & the Symbolic has, to date, examined various aspects of Ernst Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms, including 'the paths of the symbolic' ― how to symbolize is to have culture ―, and 'the persistence of myth' ― the ubiquitousness of that 'symbolic form' Cassirer described as 'lurking in...