Ernst Cassirer 1874 – 1945

Ernst Cassirer was a German Jewish philosopher and the leading representative of the Marburg neo-Kantian tradition in the twentieth century. His three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms generalized Kant's critical project to argue that human consciousness gives shape to the world through a plurality of symbolic forms, including language, myth, religion, art, and science. After fleeing Nazi Germany, he taught at Oxford, Goteborg, and finally Yale, where he wrote An Essay on Man for an English-speaking audience. His Davos debate with Heidegger in 1929 has become emblematic of a crossroads in twentieth-century philosophy.

Ernst Cassirer was born at Breslau in Silesia in July 1874 into a wealthy and cultivated Jewish family. He studied at Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, and Heidelberg, and took his doctorate at Marburg in 1899 under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, with a dissertation on Descartes's criticism of mathematical and natural-scientific knowledge. He habilitated at Berlin in 1906, taught there as Privatdozent until 1919, and was then appointed to a chair at the new University of Hamburg, of which he served as rector from 1929. Forced into exile by the Nazi laws of 1933, he taught at Oxford until 1935, at Göteborg from 1935 to 1941, at Yale from 1941 to 1944, and at Columbia until his death.

His major works are Substance and Function (Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, 1910), the three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929), Language and Myth (1925), the four-volume history Das Erkenntnisproblem (1906–1957), An Essay on Man (1944), and the posthumous The Myth of the State (1946).

Cassirer reformulated Marburg neo-Kantianism into a general philosophy of culture in which language, myth, religion, art, history, and science are so many 'symbolic forms' through which the human spirit constitutes its world. The 1929 Davos disputation with Heidegger framed for a generation the choice between a Kantian humanism of culture and an existential ontology. He died on the Columbia campus in April 1945, weeks before the end of the war.