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)
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.