His students cherished him as the most humane and learned doctor the soul. His colleagues and critics valued his view that incessant interpretation and reinterpretation keeps philosophy alive a view which enhances the very concept of The Library of Living Philosophers. Cassirer believed that precise analysis of man's creative concepts and methods reveals the essence of man himself. The 23 critical essays in this volume carefully analyze Cassirer's own concepts and methods. They illuminate his comprehensive theory of the human spirit's great symbolic forms: language, art, physics. They reveal Cassirer the man-Cassirer the philosopher of man-whose gentle cosmopolitan temperament expressed the very philosophy his encyclopedic mind conceived. The creative intellect that Cassirer saw as characteristic Cassirer of the Renaissance also characterizes Cassirer himself. He was heir to Kantian Idealism but the intellectual power he brought to bear on vast resources of learning freed him to form his own philosophy. His humanistic teaching continues to win faithful students.