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Susanne K. (Susanne Katherina Knauth) Langer
1895–1985
A philosopher who made art central to the way we think, she argued that music, painting, and ritual express forms of feeling that ordinary language cannot fully capture. Her books helped generations of readers see symbolism, emotion, and imagination as serious subjects for philosophy.
1 Audiobook
The Cruise of the Little Dipper, and Other Fairy Tales
by Susanne K. (Susanne Katherina Knauth) Langer
About the author
Born in New York in 1895, Susanne Katherina Knauth Langer became one of the earliest American women to build a major academic career in philosophy. She studied at Radcliffe and earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1926, later teaching and writing across logic, language, aesthetics, and the philosophy of mind.
She is best known for Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form, works that made her widely read far beyond philosophy departments. In them, she explored how human beings use symbols not only in words and logic, but also in art, myth, and music, arguing that artistic form can convey patterns of feeling in a distinctive way.
In her later years, she devoted herself to Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, a three-volume project that gathered many of her lifelong ideas into an ambitious account of life, feeling, and thought. She died in 1985, but her writing still speaks to readers interested in how art gives shape to inner experience.