Cassirer Ernst (1874–1945), German philosopher and intellectual historian. He was born in the German city of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) and educated at various German universities. He completed his studies in 1899 at Marburg under Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. Cassirer lectured at the University of Berlin from 1906 to 1919, then accepted a professorship at the newly founded University of Hamburg. With the rise of Nazism he left Germany in 1933, going first to a visiting appointment at All Souls College, Oxford (1933– 35) and then to a professorship at the University of Göteborg, Sweden (1935–41). In 1941 he went to the United States; he taught first at Yale (1941–44) and then at Columbia (1944–45). Cassirer’s works may be divided into those in the history of philosophy and culture and those that present his own systematic thought. The former include major editions of Leibniz and Kant; his four-volume study The Problem of Knowledge (vols. 1–3, 1906–20; vol. 4, 1950), which traces the subject from Nicholas of Cusa to the twentieth century; and individual works on Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Goethe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and English Platonism. The latter include his multivolume The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), which presents a philosophy of human culture based on types of symbolism found in myth, language, and mathematical science; and individual works concerned with problems in such fields as logic, psychology, aesthetics, linguistics, and concept formation in the humanities. Two of his best-known works are An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (1946). Cassirer did not consider his systematic philosophy and his historical studies as separate endeavors; each grounded the other. Because of his involvement with the Marburg School, his philosophical position is frequently but mistakenly typed as neo-Kantian. Kant is an important influence on him, but so are Hegel, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe, Leibniz, and Vico. Cassirer derives his principal philosophical concept, symbolic form, most directly from Heinrich Hertz’s conception of notation in mechanics and the conception of the symbol in art of the Hegelian aesthetician, Friedrich Theodor Vischer. In a wider sense his conception of symbolic form is a transformation of ‘idea’ and ‘form’ within the whole tradition of philosophical idealism. Cassirer’s conception of symbolic form is not based on a distinction between the symbolic and the literal. In his view all human knowledge depends on the power to form experience through some type of symbolism. The forms of human knowledge are coextensive with forms of human culture. Those he most often analyzes are myth and religion, art, language, history, and science. These forms of symbolism constitute a total system of human knowledge and culture that is the subject matter of philosophy.
Cassirer’s influence is most evident in the aesthetics of Susanne Langer (1895–1985), but his conception of the symbol has entered into theoretical anthropology, psychology, structural linguistics, literary criticism, myth theory, aesthetics, and phenomenology. His studies of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment still stand as groundbreaking works in intellectual history.
See also HEGEL, LEIBNIZ , NEO-KANTIANISM , VIC. D.P.V.