Susanne Katherina Langer
*December 20, 1895 (New York, U.S.)
†July 17, 1985 (Old Lyme, Connecticut, U.S.)
Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher, writer, and educator, acknowledged for her influential ideas on the impact of art on the human mind. Langer studied at Radcliffe College and later earned her doctorate at Harvard University in 1926. She was one of the first American women to pursue an academic career in philosophy and the first to be professionally acknowledged as an American philosopher. Her philosophy explores the continuous process of meaning-making in the human mind through the power of seeing one thing in terms of another. Her most influential work, Philosophy in a New Key (1942), explored how humans use symbolic forms to create meaning. She later expanded these ideas in Feeling and Form (1953), analyzing how art conveys emotions. Langer’s final work, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1972, and 1982), represents the culmination of her attempt to establish a philosophical and scientific underpinning of aesthetic experience in a three-volume survey of humanistic and scientific texts.
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Primary Sources
Langer, Susanne K. (1937): An introduction to symbolic logic. London: Allen & Unwin.
Langer, Susanne K. (1948): Philosophy in a new key. A study in the symbolism of reason, rite, and art. New York: Penguin.
Langer, Susanne K. (1951): Philosophy in a new key. A study in the symbolism of reason, rite, and art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Langer, Susanne K. (1952): Philosophy in a new key. A study in the symbolism of reason, rite and art. 4. print. New York: New American Library of World Literature (A Mentor book, 25).
Langer, Susanne Katherina (1953): Feeling and form. A theory of art developed from Philosophy in a new key. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Langer, Susanne K. (1954): Philosophy in a new key. A study in the symbolism of reason, rite and art. 6. printing. New York: New American Library of World Literature (A Mentor book, 25).
Langer, Susanne K. (1956): The growing center. In: Frontiers of knowledge in the study of man.
Langer, Susanne K. (1957): Philosophie auf neuem Wege. Das Symbol im Denken, im Ritus und in der Kunst. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
Langer, Susanne K. (1963): Feeling and form. A theory of art developed from philosophy in a new key. 3. impr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth (1967): Feeling and form. A theory of art developed from philosophy in a new key. 4. impr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth (1967): Mind. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr.
Langer, Susanne K. (Hg.) (1968): Reflections on art. A scource book of writings by artists, critics, and philosophers. Repr. of the ed. Baltimore 1958. London: Oxford Univ. Press. -
Secondary Sources
Bahr, Petra (2005): Susanne K. Langer. Religion als Auftakt des Geistes in der Theorie des Lebendigen. In: Kompendium Religionstheorie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005.
Cassirer, Ernst (1952): Language and myth. (Unaltered reprint of the first ed.). New York: Dover Publications.
Chaplin-Dengerink, Adrienne (2019): The philosophy of Susanne Langer. Embodied meaning in logic, art and feeling. First edition. London, New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic; Bloomsbury Publishing.
Grüny, Christian (2022): Der Mythos des inneren Lebens. Susanne K. Langer über die Rolle der Musik für unser Selbstverständnis. In: Daniel Martin Feige und Gesa zur Nieden (Hg.): Musik und Subjektivität. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022.
Innis, Robert E. (2009): Susanne Langer in focus. The symbolic mind. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press (American philosophy).
Jensen, Jeppe Sinding (Hg.) (2009): Myths and mythologies. London [u.a.]: Equinox, 2009.
Jeunhomme, J. M. P. (1985): The Symbolic Philosophy of Susanne K. Langer. In: Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie. DOI: 10.1515/nzst.1985.27.1.159.
Kösters, Barbara (1992): Lebendige Form und Symbol. Zur Theorie des Geistes in d. Philosophie Susanne K. Langers. Düsseldorf, Univ., Diss., 1992.
Kösters, Barbara (1993): Gefühl, Abstraktion, symbolische Transformation. Zu Susanne Langers Philosophie des Lebendigen. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Wien: Lang (Studia philosophica et historica, Bd. 20).
Lachmann, Rolf (1997): From metaphysics to art and back. The relevance of Susanne K. Langer’s philosophy for process metaphysics. In: Process studies. - Online Sources
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