Returns to Cassirer’s notion of function to argue that it continuously informs his conception of philosophy. Cassirer first develops this notion in his 1910 work Substance and Function: the mathematical idea of a function connects disparate elements under a variable rule, establishing a unity through diversity (8.1). Subsequently, his early historical writings (1906‒1919) invoke the idea of a functional unity in order to explain the continuity and progress in the history of thought while simultaneously acknowledging the legitimacy of each historical epoch (8.2). Cassirer’s mature, systematic, writings (1923‒1942) reconcile the unity of human culture and the synchronic diversity of our cultural domains by means of the same idea (8.3). Finally, the ethical reflections that we find in Cassirer’s latest writings (1935‒1946) are also rooted in this ‘functional conception of philosophy’ (8.4).

Offers a thorough reading of all texts in which Cassirer and Heidegger explicitly engaged with each other’s thought. I first sketch the philosophical context of the Davos debate, which constitutes only one moment of a dispute that started in 1923 and continued until the publication of Cassirer’s The Myth of the State in 1946 (1.1). Second, I argue that the public debate in Davos hinges on three interrelated topics: the proper interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, the human condition, and the task of philosophy. Concretely, I show that Cassirer and Heidegger’s diverging readings of Kant are motivated by their different views on the human condition, and that these views are in turn motivated by different conceptions of the task of philosophy, which I consider to be the fundamental breaking point between these two thinkers (1.2). Third, I explain that the same issues of contention also structure, in the same order and with the same increasing intensity, the entire, 23-year-long Cassirer‒Heidegger dispute (1.3).

Considers the implications of Cassirer and Heidegger’s respective conceptions of philosophy for their views on its existential task. Cassirer asserts a hierarchy among the cultural domains based on the self-understanding of symbolic consciousness (10.1). Heidegger navigates the dialectics between disowned, average, and owned selfhood (10.2). On this basis, I address the ultimate breaking point between Cassirer and Heidegger: their respective Enlightened and ‘therapeutic’ conception of the task of philosophy. While for Cassirer philosophy is the caretaker of our self-liberation through culture, for Heidegger it ought to help us reconcile with our ineradicable shortcomings ‒ the latter view is therapeutic in the psychoanalytic sense, it has no affinity with Wittgenstein's notion of philosophy as therapy.