SOURCE: "Thinking Cassirer," in Criticism, Vol. XXV, No. 3, Summer, 1983, pp. 181-95.

In the following essay, Adams reexamines Cassirer's thought in light of recent trends in philosophy, especially the widespread acceptance of Martin Heidegger's philosophy.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Ernst Cassirer was a doctoral candidate at Marburg preparing his study of Descartes and Leibniz, there was a movement led by his teachers, the Marburg philosophers Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, which had as its rallying cry "Back to Kant." One was not simply to return to Kant to accept all he said, but to start from Kant again. Cassirer's thought was formed in this atmosphere, and it proved to be a liberation for him. More recently it has been regarded as a limitation everywhere present in his work. Contemporary phenomenologists have particularly regarded it as so. Cassirer is not any longer in the high...