Animal Symbolicum. Cassirer Lettore di Herder

Missing in the wide-ranging debate on the sources of Cassirer's work has been a careful survey of his comparison with Herder's philosophy, the importance of which was stressed by Hendel editor of the American edition of the Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1955). Indeed, the central cores of Cassirer's reflection on history, the origin of language, the distinction between animal and human languages, and the analysis of linguistic pathologies constantly refer back to Herder and in particular to his fundamental conception of Besonnenheit, of which Cassirer provided a penetrating interpretation. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the significance of Herder's philosophy of language in Cassirer's historiographical and theoretical work.