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!
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*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.
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Date:* 18/06/2026
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Time:* 16h45
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Venue:* New Institute Building (NIG), Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, HS 3C
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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.