15 Facts About Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer was one of the leading 20th-century advocates of philosophical idealism.

Ernst Cassirer was born in Breslau in Silesia, into a Jewish family.

Ernst Cassirer then did his doctoral work at University of Marburg where he studied Philosophy under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp and Mathematics under Friedrich Schottky.

When Ernst Cassirer considered Sweden too unsafe, he applied for a post at Harvard University, but was rejected because thirty years earlier he had rejected a job offer from them.

Ernst Cassirer died of a heart attack in April 1945 in New York City.

Donald Phillip Verene, who published some of Ernst Cassirer's papers kept at Yale University, gave this overview of his ideas:.

Ernst Cassirer wrote a book about Quantum mechanics called Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics.

At Hamburg Ernst Cassirer discovered the Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg.

In Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Ernst Cassirer argues that man is a "symbolic animal".

Ernst Cassirer argues that science and mathematics developed from natural language, and religion and art from myth.

In 1929 Ernst Cassirer took part in a historically significant encounter with Martin Heidegger in Davos during the Second Davos Hochschulkurs.

Ernst Cassirer argues that while Kant's Critique of Pure Reason emphasizes human temporality and finitude, he sought to situate human cognition within a broader conception of humanity.

Ernst Cassirer's last work, The Myth of the State, was published posthumously; at one level it is an attempt to understand the intellectual origins of Nazi Germany.

Ernst Cassirer sees Nazi Germany as a society in which the dangerous power of myth is not checked or subdued by superior forces.

Ernst Cassirer claimed that in 20th-century politics there was a return, with the passive acquiescence of Martin Heidegger, to the irrationality of myth, and in particular to a belief that there is such a thing as destiny.