A festschrift for Ernst Cassirer treating philosophy, history of philosophy and history of ideas, historiography, and related pursuits. Author names are given in underline:

Alexander

: the permanent features of things appear at different times in different forms; it’s permissible to think of forever in terms of now so long as we consider essence not surface characteristics. Novelty is the essence of history, explanation is the work; determinism in history means asserting pre-arranged necessity instead of changes in form over time.

Webb

: philosophy is different from history, science, etc. in declining to accept precepts; but it may settle on some and proceed from these. Consciousness, such as religious consciousness, is finite. Yet philosophy cannot ignore religious consciousness because of finitude: Athens cannot disprove Jerusalem.

Gilson (one of the better essayists)

: there is no great scientific discovery dating to the Middle Ages. Science rose in opposition to medieval philosophy and theology. Save the Aristotelian Leibniz, all chose between science or scholasticism. But they are not irreconcilable: scholastic philosophy has only to become true to itself to reconcile with science.
Descartes converted ideas to mathematical models, bereft of discourse, representing reality itself. Scholastic ideals could not be reduced to expressible content; they are something other. His successor was Hobbes: the effects of Cartesian metaphysics spread to proto-sociology. And thence to political philosophy – servitude to all powerful state derived from liberties!
The antinomy of philosophy consists of 1) the irrationality of building the collective (the state) from irreducible individuals versus 2) man is nothing, humanity is everything. Aquinas and Duns Scotus held they are reconciled in the real: the antinomy is manmade. In the other words, the error is Cartesian reduction to science (mathematics), which decrees a priori thee real is the sum of the real.
Aristotle’s mistake was to biologize the inorganic; Descartes’ to mathematize physics, chemistry, biology, metaphysics, and moral theory. Every ‘nature’ requires a formal principle, but not every form is living. Then metaphysics is the science above natural sciences, and its problem of defining existence is superior. For this reason, Christianity cannot allow metaphysics to expire

Groethuysen

: reflection on the self occurs in different forms: religion, art, philosophy.

Gentile

: historical fact is not presupposed by history. ‘Ideas without facts are empty; philosophy which is not history is the value’s abstraction’. The truth of the past lies not in facts but in imaginative use of what happened (or was happening). Does this trend toward existentialism?

Stebbing

: without time there is no causation; without causation there is no time. The possibility of causal order is the sole condition for a time sequence in nature

Medicus

: the final problem of the Kantian system is the unity of object and subject, of nature and freedom, which is treated in

Critique of Judgment

. How does it assert itself? ‘Intransferable uniqueness’ is one’s calling, according to Cassirer; an era has it too – but neither are usually well defined – more usually they are in a form of questions. The historian is the servant of a culture’s self-awareness, not in obsequious search of power but truth. ‘The longest view is always from the heights’. For Cassirer, the object of history is the fulfillment of humanity.

Brehier

: the history of philosophy commenced in the 17th century from Cartesian thought, and circa 1930 needs reworking. Documentary evidence, standing in for tradition, stands in the way of understanding what happened. Historical truth does not involve truth of the thought in question

Hoffman

: The Platonic idea is behind Augustine’s philosophy of History

Levy-Bruhl

: Descartes attacked the authority of tradition because it could not be demonstrated by scientific method. History was lumped together with religion

Saxl

: veritas filia temporis – truth reveals itself over time. Art struggles with abstract concepts such as truth. The scientific age settled the war between the ancients and moderns on the side of the moderns, which admitted no abstract truth.

Wind

: there are several commonalities at the intersection of history and science. The information which a document reveals requires presupposition of understanding the contents themselves in the first place. The observer of events is an intruder, and the dividing line between observer and participant is difficult to fix. Until recently historians and scientist were cloistered; now their discoveries could be world-changing

Pos

: Philosophy is never deductive like math. Knowledge is relative in the sense that it’s open to interpretation and permeated by ‘alien’ (unproven) concepts

Gundolf

: the two predominant objectives of historiography are to preserve the past as it actually was (Ranke) and whether to interpret the past in light of a) providence or b) universal laws.The pattern recurs in German historiography: German practice springs from the philosophically minded Herder, and thence to Ranke

Ortega y Gasset (another standout)

: the most decisive changes in humanity are those of belief.
Historical reason is more demanding than scientific reason, which does not understand what it’s saying, only that it can be proven true. Science’s loss of the ability to express truths is mortal to civilization. Reason, in modern times degraded to mean the play of ideas, was in Greece and the 16th century understood as being in contact with the order of the cosmos / providence. It was itself a faith.
German idealism represents the attempt to place man before nature, like positivism. Hegel in particular demonstrates the lack of intellectual responsibility, evidencing a bankrupt moral climate.
Philosophy since Kant has been a ‘second apprenticeship’, pursuit of discovering authentic reality. Thought has its own form and projects these onto the real: man cannot escape. We must de-intellectualize the real to be faithful to it. But: nature is a transitory interpretation of what man finds around him. He has no nature; but he has history. Only under the pressure of events (history) do we differentiate between what we are and what we imagine ourselves to be: we become compact, solid.

Klibansky

: history can be described as a science inasmuch as philosophic precepts (e.g., Kantian regulative principle or Platonic sense of normative pattern from ideas) order its proceedings