| Ernst Cassirer | |
|---|---|
 Ernst Cassirer |
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| Full name | Ernst Cassirer |
| Born | July 28, 1874 Breslau, Germany |
| Died | April 13, 1945 |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Neo-Kantianism |
Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century, a German Jewish philosopher. Coming out of the Marburg tradition of neo-Kantianism, he developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols founded in a phenomenology of knowledge. His son, Heinz Cassirer, was also a Kantian scholar.
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Cassirer was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia, into a Jewish family. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After long years as Privatdozent at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (Cassirer turned down the offer of a visiting professorship at Harvard which he and his wife considered obscure and remote), he was elected to a chair of philosophy at the newly-founded University of Hamburg in 1919, where he lectured until 1933, and supervised the doctoral thesis of Leo Strauss. Cassirer was forced to leave Germany because the Nazis came to power.
After leaving Germany he found first refuge as a lecturer in Oxford 1933–1935; he was then professor at Gothenburg University 1935–1941. When Cassirer - who considered Sweden too unsafe by then - tried to go to the United States and specifically to Harvard, the university turned him down because he had turned Harvard down thirty years earlier. Thus, he first had to work as a visiting professor at Yale University, New Haven 1941–1943, and only then moving to Columbia University in New York, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945. As he had been naturalized in Sweden, he died on the Columbia campus as Swedish citizen of German-Jewish descent.
Cassirer was both a genuine philosopher and an historian of philosophy. His major work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929) is considered a benchmark for a philosophy of culture. Man, says Cassirer later in his more popular Essay on Man (1944), is a "symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, man has created his own universe of symbolic meaning that structures and shapes his perception of reality - and only thus, for instance, can conceive of utopias and therefore progress in the form of shared human culture. In this, Cassirer owes much to Kant's transcendental idealism, which claimed that the actual world cannot be known, but that the human view on reality is shaped by our means of perceiving it. For Cassirer, the human world is created through symbolic forms of thought which are linguistic, scholarly, scientific, and artistic, sharing and extending through communication, individual understanding, discovery and expression.
Cassirer's last major work was The Myth of the State. The book was published posthumously in 1946 after Cassirer's sudden death. Cassirer argues that the idea of a totalitarian state evolved from ideas advanced by Plato, Dante, Machiavelli, Gobineau, Carlyle and Hegel. He concludes that the Fascist regimes of the 20th century were symbolised by a myth of destiny and the promotion of irrationality.
| Academic Genealogy | |
|---|---|
| Notable teachers | Notable students |
| Hermann Cohen Paul Natorp |
Hans Reichenbach Leo Strauss Susanne Langer Nimio de Anquín |
Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German Jewish philosopher. Coming out of the Marburg tradition of neo-Kantianism, he developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols founded in a phenomenology of knowledge. His son, Heinz Cassirer, was also a Kantian scholar.
Cassirer was elected to a chair of philosophy at the newly-founded University of Hamburg in 1919, where he lectured until 1933. After leaving Germany, he lectured at Oxford University 1933–1935, at Gothenburg University 1935–1941, at Yale University 1941–1943, and lastly at Columbia University 1943-1945 until his death.
   | History of the Cassirer family - Cassirer: from Schwientochlowitz to Breslau |
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