BOOK REVIEW Deniz Coskun, Law as Symbolic Form: Ernst Cassirer and the Anthropocentric View of Law Dordrecht: Springer, 2007, 381 pp Gary Wickham Published online: 10 October 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Deniz Coskun is convinced that Ernst Cassirer’s work is vital for those legal and socio-legal scholars who: (a) are committed to the project of advancing human rights; (b) think that law is much more about meaning than it is about the positive law of the state; and, (c) believe that philosophy is crucial to the study of law. If you find yourself ticking all three boxes, then this is a book for you. It is scholarly, careful, and thorough, detailing Cassirer’s position on human rights, ethics, and semiotics, and explaining his complex relations with German neo-Kantianism. Taking Goethe as his ideal and the spread of human rights as his goal, the Cassirer that Coskun captures so well channels much of his intellectual energy to the promotion of the purposeful, engaged, morally responsible individual (pp. 129– 132). It is the spirit, as well as the body, of this type of individual that Cassirer seeks to protect, particularly against what he regards as the insidious pessimism of ‘life philosophy’, with his special targets being Nietzsche and Heidegger. He is concerned that these thinkers deny individuality, and so ignore the moral responsibilities that go with it (pp. 138–143). Coskun argues that this position does not commit Cassirer to any essentialist definition of the individual, avoiding the destructive tendency to offer any substantive definition of human nature by offering instead a functional definition. In this way, Coskun contends, Cassirer is dealing with the lives of human beings, not with their will to power, their sexual drive, or their economic instincts. He focuses on their actual works and deeds, Coskun goes on, so that he can highlight individual human culture, which for him is the only ‘true’ culture (p. 183). Individual humans and their human rights serve together as ‘‘a basis phenomenon for law’’ (p. 272). Cassirer’s focus on humans and their rights—the rights associated with their moral responsibilities—is not, then, a purely individualistic matter. Individuals can only become and remain morally responsible beings if they exist in the ‘true’ G. Wickham (&) Department of Sociology, Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA 6150, Australia e-mail: G.Wickham@murdoch.edu.au 123 Int J Semiot Law (2009) 22:477–481 DOI 10.1007/s11196-009-9126-4