Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth (1895–1985)

With roots in logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, Susanne Langer sought to explicate the meaning and cognitive import of art works by developing a theory of symbolism that located works of art at the centre of a network of relations based firmly on semantic theory. Art works were non-discursive, presentational symbols that expressed an artist’s ‘life of feeling’, by which observers, through a process of immediate apprehension (or intuition) came to acquire knowledge.