Susanne Katherina Langer, 1895 - 1985
From dust jacket of Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967)
Born: 20 December 1895, Manhattan, New York
Died: 17 July 1985, Old Lyme, Connecticut
Born Susanne Katherina Knauth, she was raised in a family where only German was spoken. Her father was a corporate lawyer and amateur musician, Susanne took piano and music and played the cello throughout her life. Her mother was literary, Susanne read Kant in the German original and Louisa May Alcott in English at age twelve, wrote poetry as a child, and fairy tales as a young woman. She attended the Veltin School for Girls on the Upper West Side, and added French as a language. She didn't enter Radcliffe until 1916, when she was twenty, studying philosophy and logic and graduating in 1920. The next year she married William L. Langer, they studied at Vienna for the following year. Susanne started her graduate work at Radcliffe the next year, earning her M.A. in 1924 and her Ph.D. in 1926, by which time she had two sons. Her dissertation advisor was Alfred North Whitehead. She was an early leader in the field of formal logic in the US, was a founder of the Association for Symbolic Logic, and was an editor and reviewer for their magazines, by this time adding Italian to the languages in which she was fluent. Langer's major work was extending logic from the realm of inference to the study of structures and patterns, becoming one of the first philosophers to deal with the arts. She left Radcliffe in 1942 and spent twelve years in a number of short-term and visiting positions, in 1954 she took a permanent position at Connecticut College, grants she received for her research allowed her to stop teaching two years later. She finished the last volume of Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling in early 1985 and died at home, aged 89.
Biography from Wikipedia and Anthony Flood
Susanne Langer quotes:
Quotes found : 27 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 2) 1 2 Next
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- A mind that is very selective to forms ... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas. permalink
Susanne Langer - A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them. permalink
Susanne Langer - A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents. permalink
Susanne Langer - Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling. permalink
Susanne Langer - Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (1953) - Art is the objectification of feeling and the subjectification of nature. permalink
Susanne Langer - Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967/82) - Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures. permalink
Susanne Langer - Problems of Art (1961) - Common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable. permalink
Susanne Langer - Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling. permalink
Susanne Langer - Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live. permalink
Susanne Langer - Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942) - If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably. permalink
Susanne Langer - If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions. permalink
Susanne Langer - In human life, art may arise from almost any activity, and once it does so, it is launched on a long road of exploration, invention, freedom to the limits of extravagance, interference to the point of frustration, finally discipline, controlling constant change and growth. permalink
Susanne Langer - It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age. permalink
Susanne Langer - Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942) - Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind. permalink
Susanne Langer - Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. permalink
Susanne Langer - Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942)
Quotes found : 27 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 2) 1 2 Next
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