Susanne Langer 1895 – 1985
Susanne Knauth Langer was an American philosopher of mind, art, and language and one of the first women to achieve a major reputation in twentieth-century American philosophy. A student of Whitehead at Harvard, she developed a philosophy of symbolic forms in conversation with the work of Cassirer, articulated in her widely read Philosophy in a New Key and the three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Against the dominant logical empiricism of her day, she insisted that art is the principal symbolic medium for the expression of human feeling and that philosophy must take the symbolic life of culture as one of its central subjects.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic, Pragmatism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“Art is the symbolic expression of human feeling.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“The mind is a symbol-making organ.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“Music is the morphology of feeling.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“Symbols are the principal instruments of human thought.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“A philosophy without an aesthetic is a philosophy that has not understood mind.”