Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling: The Philosophy of Susanne Langer

This book offers a comprehensive study of Susanne Langer, one of the most insightful and fertile yet neglected philosophers of the twentieth century. Failure to recognize Langer's seminal philosophical sources has led to frequent misinterpretations and misunderstandings of her unique philosophical thought.

Beginning with an overview of Langer's life and education, this study provides a much-needed explanation of how her thinking was shaped by four seminal sources: her mentors Henry Sheffer and Alfred North Whitehead, and the European philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Langer's ability to unite seemingly disparate fields such as logic, art, and embodied cognition around the notion of symbolic form places aesthetics not at the margins of philosophy, but at its very centre.

By locating Langer's work in the broader context of major developments in twentieth-century European and American philosophy, Dengerink Chaplin shows how she was often ahead of her time. This book sheds new light on Langer as an American philosopher whose innovative thought crosses the customary boundaries between analytic and continental philosophy, confirming why she continues to have relevance today.

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