Ernst Cassirer was born in Germany 1874 in the city of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland). He taught at Hamburg University from 1919 to 1933, and then at All Souls College, Oxford, before emigrating to Sweden and then to the United States. Through its creative interpretation of Kant's philosophy combined with a deep knowledge of the role of language and culture, Cassirer's work is regarded as indispensable to understanding the relationship between the two major traditions in twentieth-century philosophy, the "analytic" and the "continental". Cassirer's philosophy is unique, as it sought a common ground between the scientific and humanistic worldviews which frequently divided these two traditions, exemplified in his famous debate with Martin Heidegger at Davos in 1929. His work resulted in the monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as well as several books on the philosophy of humanism and the Enlightenment. He taught at the universities of Yale and Columbia in the early 1940s and died in New York in 1945.

Steve G. Lofts is Professor of Philosophy at King's University College, Canada. He is the translator of Cassirer's The Logic of the Cultural Sciences and The Warburg Years (1919-1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology.

Foreword Peter E. Gordon Translator's Preface Steve G. Lofts Translator's Introduction: The Question Concerning the Human - Life, Form, and Freedom: On the Way to an Open Cosmopolitanism Steve G. Lofts Translator's Acknowledgements Steve G. Lofts Preface Introduction and the Framing of the Problem Volume 1: Toward a Phenomenology of the Linguistic Form 1. The Problem of Language in the History of Philosophy 2. Language in the Phase of Sensible Expression 3. Language in the Phase of Intuitive Expression 4. Language as the Expression of Conceptual Thinking: The Form of Linguistic Concept and Class Formation 5. Language and the Expression of the Pure Forms of Relation: The Sphere of Judgment and the Concepts of Relation [Relation]. Glossary of German Terms Index