Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer was the greatest philosopher of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism and the creator of the philosophy of symbolic forms — one of the most ambitious philosophical projects of the twentieth century. Where Kant had focused on scientific knowledge, Cassirer argued that all human culture — myth, language, art, science, history — is an expression of the symbolic activity that defines our species.

His three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms argued that reality is never given directly but is always mediated through symbol systems, each with its own internal logic. Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933 as a Jew, Cassirer spent years in exile before settling at Yale and Columbia. His debate with Heidegger at Davos in 1929 — the most celebrated philosophical confrontation of the century — dramatised the choice between humanist rationalism and radical existential critique.