Ernst Cassirer was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science; after Cohen's death, he developed a theory of symbolism, and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture. He is one of the leading 20th century advocates of philosophical idealism.
At Hamburg Cassirer discovered the Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg. Warburg was an art historian who was particularly interested in ritual and myth as sources of surviving forms of emotional expression. In Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929) Cassirer argues that man (as he put it in his more popular 1944 book Essay on Man) is a "symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, humans create a universe of symbolic meanings. Cassirer is particularly interested in natural language and myth. He argues that science and mathematics developed from natural language, and religion and art from myth.
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Subjects
Philosophy, Theory of Knowledge, Symbolism, Language and languages, Mythology, Civilization, History, Philosophie, Modern Philosophy, Connaissance, Théorie de la, Relativity (Physics), Renaissance Philosophy, Philosophical anthropology, The State, German Philosophy, Human beings, Humanities, Knowledge, theory of, Physics, Political science, Substance (Philosophy), Causality (Physics), Cosmology, Enlightenment, Free will and determinismPeople
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), René Descartes (1596-1650), Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), Christina Queen of Sweden (1626-1689), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Freiherr von (1646-1716), Nicholas of Cusa, Cardinal (1401-1464), Pierre Corneille (1606-1684), Thomas Thorild (1759-1808), Aby Warburg (1866-1929), Axel Hägerström (1868-1939), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Günter Braun, Jahann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832), Johanna Braun, John Chrysostom Saint (-407), Plato, Thomas Mann (1875-1955), ernst cassirerID Numbers
- OLID: OL71308A
- ISNI: 000000012146438X
- VIAF: 106965171
- Wikidata: Q57188
- Inventaire.io: wd:Q57188
January 13, 2025 | Edited by raybb | Edited without comment. |
September 27, 2020 | Edited by MARC Bot | add ISNI |
March 31, 2017 | Edited by MARC Bot | add VIAF and wikidata ID |
July 17, 2015 | Edited by vijay varadharaj | About the author |
April 1, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | initial import |