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.

Susanne Knauth Langer was born in 1895 in New York City into a cultured German-American family. She studied at Radcliffe College under Alfred North Whitehead and Henry Sheffer, took her doctorate at Harvard in 1926 with a dissertation on the logical analysis of meaning, and after teaching at Radcliffe, the University of Delaware, Columbia, and several smaller colleges held a research professorship at Connecticut College from 1954.

Her early Practice of Philosophy (1930) and Introduction to Symbolic Logic (1937) established her in the formal tradition of American analytic philosophy. The breakthrough Philosophy in a New Key (1942) extended the Cassirer-Whitehead conception of symbolic form to the non-discursive domains of myth, ritual, and especially music; the further volumes Feeling and Form (1953) and Problems of Art (1957) followed, and her career closed with the three large volumes of Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1972, 1982).

Langer offered one of the most ambitious philosophies of the arts written in the twentieth century: art is the creation of perceptible forms expressive of the patterns of human feeling, and the study of art belongs at the center of philosophy of mind. She died at Old Lyme, Connecticut in July 1985 at the age of eighty-nine.