Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) was born in Breslau into a Jewish merchant family and trained at Marburg under the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen. He began as a historian of science; his career opened out into the philosophy of culture at the University of Hamburg, with direct access to Aby Warburg's library. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he left Germany and taught at Oxford, Gothenburg, and finally Yale and Columbia.

The three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Language, 1923 — Mythical Thought, 1925 — The Phenomenology of Knowledge, 1929) develop the same thesis on different materials. Kant had argued that a priori forms make the world available to us; Cassirer widens the frame. The human does not face the world as a bare set of objects but through culturally built symbolic forms. Myth, language, art, science — each is a mode of seeing with its own laws and its own logic. Science is not 'higher' than myth but a different form; one does not displace the other.

Cassirer's most visible public moment is the Davos debate of 1929, when he met Martin Heidegger in a public session in Switzerland to dispute the reading of Kant. Cassirer pressed the side of culture that carries the human past its given limits; Heidegger pressed finitude and being-toward-death. The two routes mark one of the great forks of twentieth-century European philosophy. Cassirer's 1944 An Essay on Man, written for the English-language world, is the short version of the three-volume system — a wide source for twentieth-century cultural theory from anthropology to linguistics.