Abstract

Samantha Matherne has written an excellent, timely introduction to the thought of Ernst Cassirer, the brilliant polymath who was the last representative of the “Marburg school” of neo-Kantianism, and who is well-known for wrangling a wide range of cultural phenomena into a system of “symbolic forms.” Despite Cassirer’s recent rise in prominence in the English-speaking philosophical world, there is only one other single-volume survey of his thought in English, Edward Skidelsky’s Ernst Cassirer. Matherne’s book has the merit of helping to shore up this scholarly gap, and of providing a clear and succinct presentation of the philosophical system that...