Philosopher
Susanne Langer
1895–1985
Also known as Susanne K. Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth
American philosopher of symbolic form whose Philosophy in a New Key sold over 600,000 copies, and whose theory of art and feeling made her a leading philosopher of art.
Susanne Langer, born Susanne Knauth in 1895, studied in Vienna in 1921 and in the 1920s and 1930s was among the first to interpret Frege, Russell, Whitehead and the early Wittgenstein, setting them in the American setting of pragmatism and the logic of Henry Sheffer. Her books included an early introduction to analytic philosophy and one of the first modern textbooks of symbolic logic in English.
Her theory of meaning was then extended to music, language and culture. Philosophy in a New Key became, in its mass-market edition, one of the best-selling philosophy books in English of the twentieth century, and helped English readers discover Ernst Cassirer, with whom she later worked and whose Language and Myth she translated. She died in 1985.
Key ideas
- Presentational and discursive symbols
- Science and mathematics use discursive symbols, which refer and state propositions. Dream, ritual, art, religion and politics use presentational symbols, which do not work that way but give form to feeling.
- Virtual worlds of art
- In Feeling and Form she extended her theory of music to all the arts, which create ‘virtual’ spaces, times and movements, coining the notion of virtual reality.
- Mind as feeling
- Feeling is one of the basic threads from which human thought and culture evolved. Her last trilogy, Mind, traced how consciousness grows from biological and animal roots in ever more complex forms.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- United States
- Period
- Contemporary
- Themes
- Art and beauty
Influences
Influenced by
Susanne Langer1895–1985
Influenced by
Susanne Langer1895–1985
Where these links come from
- Susanne Langer drew on Alfred North Whitehead. Source: Juliet Floyd, Susanne Langer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Susanne Langer drew on Bertrand Russell. Source: Juliet Floyd, Susanne Langer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Susanne Langer drew on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Source: Juliet Floyd, Susanne Langer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Philosophy in a New Key, 1942
- Feeling and Form, 1953
- Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, 1967
Sources
- Juliet Floyd, Susanne Langer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy