ABSTRACT
It is an honour to give the inaugural Ernst Cassirer Lecture in Intercultural Relations at the University of Glasgow. Cassirer was granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow in 1936. This new interest in Cassirer is part of a wider contemporary renaissance of cultural theory. The final turn in the development of Cassirer's cultural theory came after he left his first teaching post at Berlin for Hamburg in 1919, where he assumed the chair of philosophy at the newly founded university. Cassirer's approach to culture offers no ready-made answers to the theoretical and practical questions of modern life but a way of understanding problems. For many contemporary cultural theorists the ultimate unity of culture is found in the concept of power. Like many contemporary cultural theorists Cassirer recognized that interpretation is inescapable, but unlike many contemporary writers he saw that, in fact, cultural phenomena are not always open to any interpretation.
