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Thinkers

Ernst Cassirer

Modern European · Europe · 1874 to 1945

German thinker who held that people live in a world built from symbols, such as language, myth, art and science.

What it is

Ernst Cassirer (1874 to 1945) was a German philosopher with a unique place in twentieth-century thought. Born in Breslau to a wealthy Jewish family, he trained in the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism under Hermann Cohen, and began by writing on the history of modern philosophy and science. After Cohen died in 1918 he developed a theory of symbolism and used it to widen the philosophy of science into a philosophy of culture.

More than any German philosopher since Kant, he gave equal attention to the foundations of mathematics and natural science and to art, history and the other cultural sciences. At Hamburg he drew on the Library of the Cultural Sciences set up by the art historian Aby Warburg, which held rich material on myth, ritual and art. He died in 1945.

The main ideas

  • Symbolic forms. The central thought of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is that human beings understand and shape the world through symbols, and that language, myth, art, religion and science are each such a form.
  • Science and culture together. He refused to treat mathematics and the natural sciences as the only serious kind of knowledge, and gave culture and history equal philosophical weight.
  • A history of knowledge. In early works on Leibniz and on the problem of knowledge from the Renaissance to Kant, he read modern thought as a whole, philosophy and science together.
  • Activity of thought. Following the Marburg school, he held that knowledge is built by the active, synthesising work of thought, not merely received.
  • Hegel's phenomenology. He took the word "phenomenology" in the sense that Hegel gave it, as a study of how forms of knowledge unfold.
  • Myth and ritual. The Warburg Library, with its material on myth, ritual and magic, helped shape his view that myth is a form of human understanding in its own right.

What it looks like in practice

Think of how a map, a story and an equation each give a different kind of grip on the same city. Cassirer would say that none is a copy of reality. Each is a form through which people give the world structure, and the philosopher's task is to understand how these forms differ and how they belong together. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • His book on Leibniz (1902) is one of his first works, placing Leibniz in the context of his science.
  • Das Erkenntnisproblem (1906 and 1907) is a large history of modern thought from the Renaissance through Kant.
  • The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is his major work, in three volumes; the third, the Phenomenology of Knowledge, appeared in 1929.

Questions and criticism

  • A very wide net. He tried to cover science, language, myth and art in one account, and it is fair to ask whether one idea of symbolic form can do that.
  • Is there a unity? If each form has its own logic, it is fair to ask what unites them.
  • Hegel or Kant? Commentators have examined how close his work is to Hegel's, since he stressed the kinship in the prefaces to his own volumes.

Close neighbours

Immanuel Kant is the thinker he took as his starting point, and Georg Hegel the thinker whose idea of phenomenology he adopted. The page on Gottfried Leibniz shows the philosopher he wrote about in his first book.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Immanuel Kant · He was a leading thinker of the Marburg school that revived Kant, and extended his critique to all forms of culture.

Other Modern European thinkers

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