Ernst Cassirer, the German neo-Kantian philosopher, was born in Breslau, Silesia. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Marburg and taught first at Berlin. From 1919 to 1933 he was professor of philosophy at Hamburg University; and he served as rector from 1930 to 1933. Cassirer, who was Jewish, resigned his post in 1933 and left Germany. He taught at Oxford from 1933 to 1935, at Göteborg, Sweden from 1935 to 1941, and at Yale from 1941 to 1944. He died in New York City while a visiting professor at Columbia University.

Cassirer was both a prolific historian of philosophy and an original philosopher. His philosophy is in many important respects a development and modification of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy, idealistic in outlook and transcendental in method. Like Kant, he holds that the objective world results from the application of a priori principles to a manifold that can be apprehended only...