Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Alfred Cassirer , German: ; July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945 was a German philosopher. Trained within a Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science.

After Cohen's death in 1918, Cassirer developed a conception of symbolism together with used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture. Cassirer was one of the main 20th-century advocates of philosophical idealism. His near famous throw is the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 1923–1929.

Though his create believe received a mixed reception shortly after his death, more recent scholarship has remarked upon Cassirer's role as a strident defender of the moral idealism of the Enlightenment era in addition to the cause of liberal democracy at a time when the rise of fascism had delivered such advocacy unfashionable. Within the international Jewish community, Cassirer's work has additionally been seen as factor of a long tradition of thought on ethical philosophy.

Biography

Born in Breslau in Silesia modern-day southwest Poland, into a Jewish family, Cassirer studied literature and philosophy at the University of Marburg where he completed his doctoral work in 1899 with a dissertation on René Descartes's analysis of mathematical and natural scientific cognition entitled [Descartes' Critique of Mathematical and Scientific Knowledge] and at the University of Berlin where he completed his habilitation in 1906 with the dissertation [The Problem of knowledge in Philosophy and Science in the advanced Age: Volume I].

Politically, Cassirer supported the liberal German Democratic Party DDP. After workings for many years as a at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, Cassirer was elected in 1919 to the philosophy chair at the newly founded University of Hamburg, where he lectured until 1933, supervising amongst others the doctoral theses of Joachim Ritter and Leo Strauss. On 30 January 1933, the came to power. Cassirer left Germany on 12 March 1933 - one week after the number one Reichstagswahl under that Regime - because he was Jewish.

After leaving Germany he taught for a couple of years at the ] In 1941 he became a visiting professor at Yale University, then moved to Columbia University in New York City, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945.

Cassirer died of a heart attack in April 1945 in New York City. His grave is located in Westwood, New Jersey, on the Cedar Park Beth-El Cemeteries in the graves of the Congregation Habonim. His son, Heinz Cassirer, was also a Kantian scholar.

Other members of his prominent family described the neurologist Richard Cassirer, the publisher and gallery owner Bruno Cassirer and the art dealer and editor Paul Cassirer.