The recent renaissance in Cassirer scholarship warrants a careful investigation into the methodologies and the systematically significant aspects of his work. The con-tributions here assembled aim to cast light on how and to what extent his approach toidentify and criticize the various symbolic functions and their interrelations and interactions represents a constitutive method of discovery and criticism of all symbolic forms: from language to myth and knowledge, from religion to art and science. Such cultural forms share a symbolic origin whose constitution Cassirer describes in normative terms: they are understood as the necessary expressions of the human spirit that result from the fundamental function of symbolic formation, exercised in different respects for the sake of self-and world-formation and, ultimately, self-liberation.