p Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) can, with full justification, be considered one of the main “inspirations” of the semantic philosophy of art.

p Cassirer wrote no studies specially devoted to the problems of aesthetics. It is probably for this reason that in the literature on the German philosopher the view can be found that the philosophy of art was almost completely untouched by Cassirer, that supposedly he nowhere gives an analysis of art and only mentions it insofar as it has a partial similarity with myth and language. We cannot agree with this point of view. Art and literature occupy a far greater place in Cassirer’s writing than in that of any modern western philosopher.

p In his main work Die Philosophic det symbolischen Farmen there are no special sections on questions of art, but all the -same this work is extremely important to an understanding of the philosopher’s aesthetic views. In An Essay on Man a special chapter (the ninth) is devoted to an analysis of art. Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaiten (1961) considers problems of the methodology of the study of the “sciences of culture”, including the “science” of art. Two papers are of interest from the point of view of aesthetic theory: “Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophic”, and “Mythischer, asthetischer und theoretischer Raum”, which Cassirer delivered respectively at the 3rd (1927) and 4th (1930) German congresses on aesthetics and the general science of art. In his studies of Holderlin, Lessing, Schiller and Kleist, the majority of which were published in the 121 collection Idee und Cestalt (1921), in such works as Freiheit und Form (1916), Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophic det Renaissance (1927) amongst others we find a number of statements which directly or obliquely touch on theoretical problems of art.

Cassirer studies art as a philosopher. For this reason his theory of art can only be understood in the context of his entire philosophy.