Ernst Cassirer
Prussian philosopher
Died when: 70 years 259 days (848 months)Star Sign: Leo
Ernst Alfred Cassirer (/k??'s??r?r, k?'-/ kah-SEER-?r, k?-, German: ['??nst ka'si???];July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher.
Trained within the 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 theory of symbolism and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture.
Cassirer was one of the leading 20th-century advocates of philosophical idealism.His most famous work is the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929).
Though his work 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 and the cause of liberal democracy at a time when the rise of fascism had made such advocacy unfashionable.
Within the international Jewish community, Cassirer's work has additionally been seen as part of a long tradition of thought on ethical philosophy.