German philosopher and sociologist Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) is one of the main advocates of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. Although he is a follower of Kant, unlike Kant, Cassirer stresses that reality is revealed to the observer only through symbols. In his three volumes book, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929) Cassirer expanded Kant’s epistemology with a historical and comparative analysis of the evolution of human knowledge. Knowledge and all other cultural forms - language, religion, myth, magic, art, and science – are all just expressions of symbols. For Cassirer, a symbol is the main concept used in his philosophy of culture. Symbols mediate between sensory experience and meaning and allow for their instantaneous connection. All expressions of culture, language, myths, art, religion, and even science are mediated by symbols and structurally separated by layers of meaning. Symbolic forms, on the one hand, form the entire culture, while, on the other hand, they shape the individual perception of reality. This omnipresence of symbols is the reason why it is better to call a man an "animal symbolicum" instead of an "animal rationale". In the book The Myth of the State (1946), Cassirer studies the intellectual roots of the totalitarian state in Germany and concludes that in Nazi Germany, irrationality and mythical thinking about the nation and the state acted completely unfettered.

Authors: Cassirer, Ernst.

Books:

Cassirer. An Essay on Man (1944);

     -     The Myth of the State (1946).

     -     Substance and Function  (1923, in German 1910);

     -     Language and Myth (1946, in German 1925);

     -     The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel (1950, in German 1906-1920);

     -     Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951, in German 1932);

     -     The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (1963, in German 1927);

     -     The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies (2000, in German 1942);

     -     The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vol. (2020, in German 1923-1929).