SOURCE: "Some Metaphysical Problems of Cassirer's Symbolic Forms," in Man and World, Vol. 6, No. 3, September, 1973, pp. 304-21.

In the following essay, Rosenstein explores Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, placing it within the context of works by other philosophers, particularly Immanuel Kant and G.W.F Hegel.

If Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms were to be classified in traditional terminology, it could perhaps best be called a critical, functionally-monistic, objectively-relativistic, cultural idealism. The meaning of such a nomenclature as well as its essential inadequacies can only be exposed, however, through an analysis of the structure and purpose of the concept of symbolic forms upon which Cassirer bases his philosophy. It will be seen that these forms are a function of the human spirit, since they form the constitutive pre-conditions of all experience, knowledge, and activity.

What kind of function are these forms? Cassirer claims both that (in his early...