 In the Preface to the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, the Phenomenology of Knowledge (1929), Cassirer explains that his concept of phenomenology is precisely the Hegelian one [Cassirer (1929, vi–vii)]: “When I speak of a ‘Phenomenology of Knowledge,’ I do not align myself with modern usage, but I go back to the fundamental meaning of ‘phenomenology’ as Hegel established and systematically grounded and justified it. For Hegel phenomenology becomes the fundamental presupposition of philosophical knowledge, because he requires of the latter that it comprehend the totality of spiritual forms, and because this totality, according to him, can only be made visible in the transition from one form to another. [There follows a quote from the Preface to the effect that the individual has a right to demand that (philosophical) science provide a ladder by which to reach up to it.] It cannot be expressed more sharply that the end, the ‘telos’ of spirit cannot be grasped and expressed if one takes it as something self-subsistent, if one takes it as dissolved and separated from the beginning and the middle. Philosophical reflection does not set the end against the middle and the beginning in this way, but rather takes all three as integrating moments of a unitary total development.”