Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer (1874 to 1945) was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy, trained in the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. Born in Breslau into a Jewish family, he studied at several German universities and took his doctorate at Marburg under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp with a dissertation on Descartes. He first followed Cohen in supplying an idealistic philosophy of science, then after 1918 developed a theory of symbolism and a wider logic of the cultural sciences, set out in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923 to 1929). He held the philosophy chair at the University of Hamburg from 1919 until he fled Nazi Germany in 1933, and afterwards taught at Oxford, Gothenburg, Yale and Columbia. He defended the moral idealism of the Enlightenment and the cause of liberal democracy, and died in New York in 1945.