Via the life-long preoccupation of Ernst Cassirer with the problems of 'symbolic form', as he christened it, the papers collected here try to come to terms with the thinking of Goethe and Schiller on the symbol, and on related issues. Taken together, they attempt to elucidate the filiation of German classicism down through the nineteenth century to the present, in the belief that some of Cassirer's ideas have fed, often unacknowledged, into the mainstream of contemporary cultural theory, and that the rigour of his thought can help clear up much of the confusion in that 'theory'.