[News] IVC Talk: Lona Gaikis (IVC Fellow, City Council Vienna) on "The ‘Practical Unreason’ of a Hard-Headed Logician: Susanne K. Langer on "Feeling" as the Logic of Organic Processes", June 18, 4.45 pm

Dear all, our next speaker in the Philosophy of Science Colloquium organized by the Institute Vienna Circle is Lona Gaikis (IVC Fellow, City Council Vienna), who will give a talk on June 18, 4.45-6.15 pm. All are welcome! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Philosophy of Science Colloquium TALK: Lona Gaikis (IVC Fellow, City Council Vienna)* The ‘Practical Unreason’ of a Hard-Headed Logician: Susanne K. Langer on "Feeling" as the Logic of Organic Processes Philosophy of Science Colloquium The Institute Vienna Circle holds a Philosophy of Science Colloquium with talks by our present fellows. * Date:* 18/06/2026 * Time:* 16h45 * Venue:* New Institute Building (NIG), Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, HS 3C * Abstract:* Analytic philosopher Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) made a remarkably bold proposal within her discipline by approaching the study of reason in 1942 with the symbolisms of rite and the arts. Strongly engaged in the philosophical debates following Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921), and contributing to the rise of the “‘analytic type’ of philosophy” (Langer 1930, 17), she famously expanded her semiological toolkit beyond discursive form to presentational symbolism, in an attempt to provide insight into “the possibility that rationality arises as an elaboration of feeling” (Langer 1957, 124). Initially semantic in orientation, her thought evolves by 1953 in collaboration with Eugen T. Gadol into a comprehensive phenomenology of the arts, offering a theoretical instrument to capture the virtual images of feeling’s dynamic structure. The graduate of Whitehead will, later on, ground “feeling” empirically as process with biological and anthropological studies in her trilogy Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (published 1967, 1972, and 1982). It seems in review that Langer’s thought matched the rigour of her contemporaries, and carried on with the challenges her early writing encountered from the Vienna Circle’s Positivism. While the first half of her book, The Practice of Philosophy (1930) was received with praise for its clarity over philosophy’s foundational task as the “pursuit of meaning” (Langer 1930, 23), its second half already pointed to her nascent investigation of sensory modes of meaning as the “special ‘sixth sense,’ called Insight” (1930, 152). She herself commented that “TO self-respecting, hard-headed logicians, the title of this chapter will probably suggest a decline and fall of the author's Pure Reason, and the advent of some Practical Unreason” (Ibid.). This presentation picks up on Langer’s ambition of an analytic philosophy of the arts, and seeks to draw attention to her critical legacy within the spectrum of logical empiricism.