Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer
Born	(1874-07-28)July 28, 1874 Breslau, Silesia, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland)
Died	April 13, 1945(1945-04-13) (aged 70) New York, United States of America
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Neo-Kantianism

Ernst Cassirer
Scientific career
Academic advisors	Hermann Cohen Paul Natorp
Notable students	Hans Reichenbach Leo Strauss Susanne Langer Nimio de Anquín

Ernst Cassirer (German pronunciation: [kaˈsiːʁəʁ]; July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher. Influenced by Hermann Cohen and the Marburg tradition of Neo-Kantianism, Cassirer developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols grounded in a phenomenology of knowledge. He was one of the leading advocates of philosophical idealism in the first half of the 20th century.

Biography

Cassirer was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia, into a Jewish family. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After working as a Privatdozent at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin he was elected to a chair of Philosophy at the newly-founded University of Hamburg in 1919, where he lectured until 1933, supervising amongst others the doctoral thesis of Leo Strauss. Because he was Jewish, Cassirer left Germany when the Nazis came to power.

After leaving Germany he found first refuge as a lecturer in Oxford 1933–1935; and then became a professor at Gothenburg University 1935–1941. When Cassirer &mdash who considered Sweden too unsafe&mdash tried to get a post at Harvard, the university turned him down because he had turned them down thirty years earlier. He managed to obtain a post as a visiting professor at Yale University, New Haven 1941–1943, before moving to Columbia University in New York City, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945. As he had been naturalized in Sweden, he died a Swedish citizen.

His son, Heinz Cassirer, was also a Kantian scholar.

Works

In 1921 Cassirer, stimulated by Einstein's general theory of relativity, addressed the subject of scientific epistemology. Cassirer claimed that the Theory of Relativity supported his neo-Kantian conception of knowledge. Moritz Schlick responded with a review of Cassirer's book in which he claimed that Einstein refutes Kantian thought. Cassirer extended his thoughts to a more general theory of "symbolic form": aesthetic, ethical, religious, and scientific.

Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

His major work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929) Cassirer argues (as he was to put it in his later more popular Essay on Man (1944)) is a "symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, man creates his own universe of symbolic meaning that structures and shapes his perception of reality. For Cassirer, the human world is created through symbolic forms of thought which are linguistic, scientific, and artistic, which although shared, extend individual expression and understanding.

"Philosophy of the Enlightenment"

Cassirer claimed that reason's self-realization leads to liberation and human and civil rights. Mazlish (2000) argues however that in Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment) (1932) Cassirer focuses on ideas, without regard to the political or social context in which they were produced.

The Myth of the State

Cassirer's last major work was The Myth of the State. The book was published posthumously in 1946 and traces the idea of a totalitarian state back to ideas advanced by thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hegel. He claimed that in the C20th politics there had been a return back to the irrationality of myth, and in particular claims about destiny.

Heidegger

When Cassirer left Germany in 1933, his rival Martin Heidegger dominated German philosophy.

Partial bibliography

• Substance and Function (1910), English translation 1923 (at archive.org)
• Kant's Life and Thought (1918), English translation 1981
• Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), English translation 1953–1957
• Language and Myth (1925), English translation (1946) by Susanne K. Langer
• Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), English translation 1951
• The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942), English translation 2000 by S.G. Lofts (previously translated in 1961 as The Logic of the Humanities)
• An Essay on Man (written and published in English) (1944)
• The Myth of the State (written and published in English) (posthumous) (1946)
• The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel (1950) online edition
• Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945 ed. by Donald Phillip Verene (1981)

See also

• Aby Warburg

Further reading

• Barash, Jeffrey Andrew. The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (2008) excerpt and text search
• Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000) excerpt and text search
• Gordon, Peter Eli. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010)
• Krois, John Michael. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (1987)
• Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.). The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (1949)
• Schultz, William. Cassirer & Langer on Myth (2nd ed. 2000) excerpt and text search
• Skidelsky, Edward. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton University Press, 2008) 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13134-4. excerpt and text search

External links

• Michael Friedman. "Ernst Cassirer". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• History of the Cassirer family
• Centre for Intercultural Studies
• Information Philosopher on Ernst Cassirer on Free Will