Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology - CARP http://www.phenomenologycenter.org · Public domain

A philosopher who spent a career defending the Enlightenment idea that reason and liberal democracy belong together, arguing the point with particular force just as fascism was making it dangerous to hold. Trained in the Marburg school of neo-Kantian philosophy, he broke from his mentor Hermann Cohen after 1918 to build his own theory of symbolic forms, treating myth, language, and science as different ways human beings construct meaning. His major work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929), is now read as a foundational text of twentieth-century philosophy of culture.