LANGER, Susanne K.

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Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. First editions, first printings, of the cognitive philosopher's magnum opus, the "capstone of her life's work" (Hart, p. 240), the final volume of which was published when she was 87 years old. Suzanne K. Langer (1895-1985) studied under Alfred North Whitehead at Radcliffe College, and she then attended Harvard and the University of Vienna, where her influences included Wittgenstein and Ernst Cassirer."By any measure of academic achievement, hers was an exceptionally distinguished career in philosophy, with regard to both teaching and scholarship. Yet, surprisingly, her voluminous written work, pioneering and evocative in many respects, has been fairly neglected in professional circles … It must also be recalled that Langer was a woman, indeed, a divorced woman, working in a male-dominated field during her time. By all accounts, she was supremely self-assured and forthright … [and] her intellectual mastery and originality was the equal of any 20th-century philosopher" (ibid., pp. 239-45). Her contributions focused on symbolic logic, symbolism and semiotics, art and aesthetics, and the philosophy of the mind.

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