Wahrheit und Symbol

This paper reconstructs and systematizes Ernst Cassirer’s largely neglected 1929 rectoral address Forms and Transformations of the Philosophical Concept of Truth as a key text for understanding the mature architecture of his philosophy of science and culture. It argues that Cassirer uses the institutional occasion of the rectoral speech to reopen a foundational problem at the heart of modern intellectual life: how philosophy can justify its scientific standing amidst the differentiation of the sciences and the persistent divide between the natural and the cultural sciences. Against reductive unification projects—paradigmatically, the physicalist program associated with logical empiricism—the paper shows that Cassirer defends a methodological and epistemological pluralism grounded in the concept of symbolic form, without collapsing into an alethic pluralism. The central claim is that Cassirer’s “functional ideal of truth” redefines truth not as the homogenous measure of a single privileged domain (God, Reason, or Experience), but as the regulative function that can be symbolically realized in heterogeneous forms of objectification (scientific, historical, linguistic, artistic, religious). On this basis, the paper concludes that the 1929 address should be read as a covert completion of Cassirer’s mature project: it binds the notion of symbol—his fundamental concept—to truth as the philosophical concept par excellence, and thereby reframes philosophy’s task as an immanent participation in the “inner struggles” of the sciences rather than an external tribunal.