Langer, Susanne Katherina (1895-1985)

Susanne Katherina Langer

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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