Ernst Cassirer (1874 – 1945) was a German philosopher, professor at a number of universities, including Berlin, Hamburg, Oxford, Yale, and Columbia University in New York.
His books Language and Myth (1925); Symbol, Myth and Culture (1935); An Essay on Man (1944); and the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923, 1925, 1929) are particularly important for the study of signs.
Cassirer defines human beings as animal symbolicum. The semiotic perspective of his thinking is also evident in his statement that “the sign is not an accidental envelope of the idea, but a necessary and essential organ …” (1923, 86).
For Cassirer, myth, art, religion, science, and history, taken together, make up the complex world of symbolic forms, but each of them manifests its own symbols and symbolic rules.
