Susanne Langer Quotes on Knowledge
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. This page collects quotes attributed to Susanne Langer on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“The mind is a symbol-making organ.”
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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.”
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“If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.”
Ch. 1, p. 10 -
“Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.”
Ch. 10, p. 216 -
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
Ch. 1, p. 6 -
“Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.”
Ch. 3, p. 40