SOURCE: "Cassirer's Theory of Concept Formation," in The New Scholasticism, Vol. XLII, No. 1, Winter, 1968, pp. 91-102.

In the following essay, Lindgren explores the formal logic that undergirds Cassirer's theory on how concepts are formed.

In English speaking countries we have always been inclined to jump to the conclusion that the feature of Cassirer's thought which catches our notice must be the central and unifying theme of his work. In 1941, when he first came to America, his work was characterized as a philosophy of science and in 1943 it was thought to be a type of language philosophy. The only book-length interpretation of his work [Carl H. Hamburg, Symbol and Reality] considers it as a type of semantic philosophy. The discouragement which follows the discovery that none of these themes adequately organizes his theories into a coherent whole is amply witnessed by the few studies of his work which have...