Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer was a German philosopher whose work examined the forms through which people organize experience and knowledge. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is his major three-volume study of language, myth, religion, art, and science as distinct modes of human meaning. Its volumes move from Language through Mythical Thought to The Phenomenology of Knowledge, extending his neo-Kantian philosophy beyond scientific concepts into culture as a whole. Cassirer taught in Germany before leaving Europe during the 1930s and later joined American faculties. His attention to symbols also informs An Essay on Man, a shorter English-language presentation of ideas developed across the larger project.