Charles W. Morris' doctoral thesis Symbolism and Reality, written in 1925 at Chicago under George H. Mead, has never before been published. It sets out to prove that thought and mind are not entities, nor even processes involving a psychical substance distinguishable from the rest of reality, but are explicable as the functioning of parts of the experience as symbols to an organism of other parts of experience. Being then the symbolic portion of experience, the psychical or mental can neither be sharply opposed to the rest of experience nor identical with the whole of experience. This edition includes a preface by Achim Eschbach, an extensive bibliography of Morris' works, and indices of names and subjects.

Do myths and symbols have anything at all to tell us about reality? Or do they simply deserve to be relegated to the realm of fantastic unreality? The essayists in this volume deploy all the critical tools available in the task of taking myth and symbol seriously. They are not willing to consign the use of the symbolic to the logician or to relinquish the mythical to the comparative anthropologist as something of historical interest only. Instead, they strive for that difficult position that is guided by criticism but is still open to wonder in the face of what myth and symbol offer in terms of enrichment, meaning, and self-transcendence.

In 1933 eminent philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874 - 1945) fled Nazi Germany for the United States. His fame in Europe having already been established through a public debate with Martin Heidegger in 1929, Cassirer would go on to become a noteworthy influence on American culture. His most important early writings focused on the symbol and symbolic...

First published in 2002. This is Volume XV of seventeen in the Library of Philosophy series on Metaphysics. Written in 1939, this book looks at Language and Reality and the Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism and is related to the movement of Logical Positivism, initiated by Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Combined here in one volume are two books, The Crisis of Religious Symbolism and Symbolism and Reality. Although published seven years apart, these two works are integral to one another. Symbolism and Reality represents a kind of sabbath rest--its subtitle says "reflection"--after the mighty works of The Crisis of Religious Symbolism, where the deep structures of three hundred years of Western philosophical and cultural development are brought to the surface, analyzed, and made meaningful in the light of what Jean Borella has termed "the metaphysics of the symbol." Together, these two books represent a cleansing and restoration of a Christian vision of the world. Through Jean Borella's witness to the death and resurrection of religious symbolism presented here, we are given entrance to a world renewed in Christ. "Borella's writing shines with wayside jewels of intuition, as well as proceeding with a rich vein of theological reasoning."--Malachi Martin The French Catholic religious philosopher Jean Borella (b. 1930) taught metaphysics and the history of ancient and medieval philosophy at the University of Nancy II until his retirement in 1995. Besides the present works on sacred symbology, he has also written important texts on charity, analogy, Christian gnosis, mystical theology, and sacred exegesis. His latest work is To the Biblical Sources of Metaphysics (2015).