Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) was a German philosopher born in Breslau who died in Princeton. Trained in the neo-Kantian tradition, he is chiefly known as one of the foremost commentators on and successors to Kant's thought, whose epistemological foundations he explored with particular rigour. He taught in Germany until 1933, when he left the country to flee Nazism, and went on to teach at Oxford, Gothenburg and Yale. His philosophy is organised around the notion of symbolic form, which enables him to analyse the various expressions of human culture—language, myth, art and science—as modes of symbolically shaping the world. Within this framework, mathematics occupies a central place, especially because of its constitutive role in the natural sciences. Studying Felix Klein's Erlangen programme, Cassirer reconsidered Kant's a priori categories by reformulating them not as absolute and fixed forms, but as universal structures specific to each field of knowledge, particularly mathematics. This reassessment enabled him to relate Kantian transcendental philosophy to contemporary developments in mathematics and physics.