The Symbolic Construction of Reality

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a prominent member of the group of German Jewish scholars who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and emigrated to America. Like other eminent émigré scholars, Cassirer's writing and teaching provided a noteworthy contribution to the American cultural heritage. Already in 1933, the year of Hitler's rise to power and of Cassirer's departure from Germany, he was a renowned philosopher in Europe. Today Cassirer remains one of the best-known philosophers of the 20th century, not only due to his famous public debate in 1929 at Davos, Switzerland with his principle adversary, Martin Heidegger, but above all because of his theoretical work on the symbol and on symbolic interaction. Ernst Cassirer's most important work stems from the three volume *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* written in the 1920s. In this work Cassirer explores the ways in which symbols underlie the basic forms of human experience that come to expression in all human culture, from the earliest mythical cultures to modern, scientifically oriented accounts of the world. Following his work on symbolic forms, Cassirer extended his insights to encompass a broad spectrum of philosophical themes ranging