Neo-Kantianism

Ernst Cassirer Ernst Cassirer was born in Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland) on 28 July 1874 and died in New York on 13 April 1945. Trained within the Neo-Kantian tradition of the Marburg School — whose leading figures were Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp — Cassirer began his intellectual career editing Leibniz’s writings and studying the logical foundations of the exact sciences. Yet the project that would make him singular in twentieth-century philosophy was a radical expansion of the Kantian inheritance: where Kant had asked about the conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge, Cassirer asked about the conditions of possibility of all human meaning — from myth to language, from art to science. This reorientation produced the monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols., 1923–1929), a work that transformed Neo-Kantian epistemology into a philosophy of culture with full anthropological scope. ...