Prior to actually buying a couple used books by Cassirer, I had somehow come under the impression that he was a logical positivist, and had been a member of Schlick's Vienna Circle--he was of course nothing of the sort, though I have no other way of classifying him (not necessarily a bad thing).
This small, pleasing-to-read volume consists of two essays, the first presenting Cassirer's thoughts on the intellectual relationship between Rousseau and Kant, the second on Kant and Goethe.

Not being having read enough Rousseau or nearly enough Goethe, I can't really make any strong claims for the validity of Cassirer's interpretations, though they are compelling. The essay on Rousseau and Kant I found particularly interesting, because of Cassirer's claim that Kant understood Rousseau better than most modern critics, who too often elevate one aspect of Rousseau's admittedly tangled corpus against the others, coming up with a one-sided and even caricatured picture of the man whose book Emile was purportedly the only thing that ever caused Kant to miss his morning walk.

One side note: there was a, to my mind, strange translation of a famous Kantian phrase, here rendered as Kant having had to "destroy knowledge to make room for faith". I've only ever heard the more common "limit knowledge to make room for faith" which strikes me as more plausible, given that nowhere else in his work does Kant give the impression of having seen himself as a "destroyer" of knowledge. ( )