Susanne K. Langer, Necessity, and Arthur Pap: Research and Historiography
Juliet Floyd | Boston University
Zusammen mit Vienna Circle Society/Together with Vienna Circle Society
Date: October 20, 2026
Time: 7 pm
Venue: Aula am Campus der Universität Wien, Hof 1, Eingang 1.11, Spitalgasse 2-4, 1090 Wien
YouTube Livestream:
https://www.youtube.com/live/GQQ-HDpCFO4
As part of the conference
The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism. Research and Historiography
October 19-21, 2026
University of Vienna – Aula at Campus
Organized by:
Vienna Circle Society and Institute Vienna Circle
https://viennacircle-today.univie.ac.at/
Abstract
The most influential American woman in philosophy of her time, Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) must not be forgotten in our assessment of the many inheritances and “Americanizations” of the Vienna Circle. Langer studied psychology in Vienna in 1921, working with Victor Kraft. Her distinctive notion of “symbolic form” emerged from her studies of logic with Sheffer and Whitehead and her readings of Cassirer, Wittgenstein, the Gestalt theorists and Freud. Her remarkable 1926 Radcliffe PhD, “A Logical Analysis of Meaning” reflects a synthesis of American and Viennese sources in logic and philosophy, including 1. the earliest non-empiricist interpretation of the Tractatus written in the United States, 2. an application of Sheffer’s algebraical program in logic and philosophy (praised by Russell in Principia’s 2nd edition), 3. the first extensive American discussion of Frege, Russell, and Husserl in America and 4. Applications of Gestalt psychology to support Whitehead’s, C.I. Lewis’s and Sheffer’s pragmatic, relational, and process-conception of experience.
While at Columbia Langer overlapped with Arthur Pap (PhD 1945), who emigrated to New York in 1941. Pap published important papers treating necessity from a “pragmatic” point of view, insisting on the importance of the notion of “intuition” and offering a pragmatic treatment of the a priori that anticipated some of Quine’s criticisms of Carnap’s view of the analytic/synthetic distinction. We will discuss Langer’s work in relation to Pap’s work on the notion of necessity.
Short bio
Juliet Floyd is Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at Boston University and director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities (https://www.bu.edu/humanities/). Her research spans the history and development of 20thcentury analytic and American philosophy, logic and the philosophy of mathematics, ordinary language philosophy, and philosophies of computational and emerging media. She has published two volumes on Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein on Mathematics, Cambridge, 2021, Wittgenstein's Remarks on Hardy's Course of Pure Mathematics (with Felix Mühlhölzer, 2020), many articles on many philosophers from Kant to the present day, and co-edited the volumes Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in 20th Century Philosophy (with S. Shieh, Oxford 2001), Philosophy of Emerging Media (with James E. Katz, Oxford, 2016), Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing (with A. Bokulich, Springer, 2017), Perceiving the Future Through New Communication Technologies (with James E. Katz and Katie Schiepers, Springer, 2021), Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? at Fifty (with Greg Chase and Sandra Laugier, Cambridge, 2022) and Nudging Choices Through Media – Ethical and Philosophical Implications for Humanity (with James E. Katz and Katie Schiepers, Springer, 2023).