Susanne Langer

Quotes

• “The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it—right or wrong—may be given.”
• “If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.”
• “The men in the laboratory [...] cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all.[...] The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper.[...] What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions.”
• “Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.”
• “Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
• “Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.”

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Key dates

Born

20 December 1895

Died

17 July 1985

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Wikidata facts

Instance of

human

Gender

female

Citizenship

United States

Place of birth

Manhattan

Place of death

Old Lyme

Spouse

William L. Langer

Occupation

literary scholar

Educated at

Harvard University

Languages spoken

English language

Award

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Field of work

philosophy of mind

Image

Susanne Langer 1925.jpg

via Wikidata · CC0