Gregory S. Moss examines the central arguments in Ernst Cassirer's first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to show how Cassirer defends language as an autonomous cultural form, and how he borrows the concept of the "concrete universal" from G. W. F. Hegel in order to develop a concept of cultural autonomy.

1. Hegelian Psycholinguistics
2. The Copy Theory of Language
3. Kant's Transcendental Turn
4. Humboldt's Philosophy of Language
5. Towards the Schematism: Hegel's Concrete Universal
6. The Concrete Universal: Symbolic Form
7. Mystical Alternatives: Heidegger and Wittgenstein
8. On the Way to Cultural Symbolism
9. Non-Human Communication
10. The A priori Synthetic Imagination
11. Symbolic Prägnanz
12. The Grammar of the Symbolic Function
13. The Logical Function of Language
14. Form as Movement: Language as Concrete Universal
15. Beyond Language: The Serial Form of Scientific Law
16. Language: the Vehicle of Self-Knowledge

Gregory Moss is a lecturer in philosophy at Clemson University.