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. Rooted in the the Marburg tradition of neo-Kantianism, he developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols founded in a phenomenology of knowledge. A German Jew, he fled the Nazis in 1933, leaving his antagonist Heidegger to dominate postwar Continental philosophy.

His son, Heinz Cassirer, was also a Kantian scholar.

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.

Cassirer opposed the Prussian nationalism of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936). Instead of being apolitical, Cassirer applauded the rise of the Weimar Republic, while Spengler criticized parliamentary and constitutional rule, as well as individual rights, as un-German. Spengler never became a university academic, but his Decline of the West (1918) was a best-seller. Spengler saw technology as a means to transform Western society into a unified collective, while Cassirer was suspicious of technology's ability to exalt the group over the individual. Spengler saw civilization as the decline of culture, according to the physical law of entropy, while Cassirer disagreed with the application of physics to philosophy. Though both thinkers were inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's concept of the symbol, Spengler wrote about cultural souls that can be only be observed, not created, while Cassirer saw symbols as being created by individuals. After the rise of Nazism, Cassirer became more committed to changing society and more political. Although Spengler himself opposed the Nazis, Cassirer saw Spengler's anti-liberal philosophy as contributing to Nazi goals.^[1]

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.

((Academia)) template profile URL and not present in Wikidata.

• Substance and Function (1910), English translation 1923
• Kant's Life and Thought (1918), English translation 1981
• Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), English translation 1953–1957
• Language and Myth (1925), English translation (1946) by Susanne K. Langer
• Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), English translation 1951
• The Logic of the Humanities (1942), English translation 1961
• An Essay on Man (written and published in English) (1944)
• The Myth of the State (written and published in English) (posthumous) (1946)
• The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel (1950) online edition
• Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945 ed. by Donald Phillip Verene (1981)

• Barash, Jeffrey Andrew. The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (2008) excerpt and text search
• Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000) excerpt and text search
• Gordon, Peter Eli. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010)
• Krois, John Michael. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (1987)
• Schultz, William. Cassirer & Langer on Myth (2nd ed. 2000) excerpt and text search
• Skidelsky, Edward. Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton University Press, 2008) 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13134-4. excerpt and text search

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Aby Warburg

• Michael Friedman. "Ernst Cassirer". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• History of the Cassirer family
• Centre for Intercultural Studies
• Information Philosopher on Ernst Cassirer on Free Will