Ernst Cassirer

Born in Breslau on July 28, 1874, Ernst Cassirer became one of the most important German philosophers of the twentieth century. He studied in Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Marburg, where he was strongly influenced by Hermann Cohen and the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism.

Cassirer first wrote on the history of modern philosophy and the foundations of knowledge, then developed the broader project he is best known for: a philosophy of symbolic forms. In this work, he argued that human beings understand reality through symbolic systems such as language, myth, religion, art, and science. That idea gave his philosophy a wide reach and made him an important figure for readers interested not only in philosophy, but also in culture, history, and the humanities.

He taught at the University of Hamburg and later left Germany after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Years in exile took him to Oxford, Gothenburg, and eventually the United States, where he taught at Yale and Columbia. He died in New York on April 13, 1945, leaving behind a body of work that still matters for anyone curious about how human beings create meaning.