CONFERENCE OF METHODS IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENCES

New School for Social Research, May 6, 1945

Your executive committee charged me with saying a few words in memory of Ernst Cassirer. We all hoped to hear him in today's discussion. Death, all Life's pale companion, decided against it. The international community of philosophers and all the sciences lost an outstanding philosopher and a truly remarkable man. There were two rare things in him that — so it seems to me, independently of his and anybody's philosophical position — link Ernst Cassirer's name to the aims and endeavors of this conference.

We all know from, and feel in, each of our conferences, both the growing need and the growing difficulty of a philosophical universality and a close contact between the philosopher and the sciences and their divergent conceptual schemes. From decade to decade, fewer and fewer men are and will be in the future capable of embracing the whole range of philosophy — and philosophy is not philosophy without this universality — and at the same time keep in touch with the actual working of the sciences, be listened to by the physicist, who worries about the strange impasses of his science, and at the same time by the linguist, the historian of culture, the anthropologist, and so forth. That is what Ernst Cassirer, one of those very few, could still achieve, and this without losing in such broadness the unity and coherence of his philosophical position.

Those of us who knew him personally lose a wise friend and a kind helper and adviser, admirable for his rare capacity of looking at man's pas-sionate theoretical and practical mistakes with an even and balanced judg-ment, as tolerant as incorruptible.

I cannot say anything in a few words about his philosophy, his con-tribution to philosophy and the sciences — the span of his work is vast and embraces the whole realm of the human mind. Thus we bow to his memory in gratitude and grief.

Kurt Riezler