Dr. Lona Gaikis

May 1 - July 31, 2026

Affiliation: City Council Vienna, Austria

Research for a study about:

The ‘Practical Unreason’ of a Hard-Headed Logician: Susanne K. Langer’s Reception, and the Women of the Vienna Circle (1930-1940)

Lecture

The 'Practical Unreason' of a Hard-Headed Logician: Susanne K. Langer on "Feeling" as the Logic of Organic Processes

IVC Philosophy of Science Colloquium 

Date: June 18, 2026

Time: 4.45 pm -6.15 pm CET

Venue for all talks: Lecture Hall 3C, NIG Universitätsstraße 7, 3rd floor, NIG/ Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna

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.