By Robert E. Innis
ISBN-10: 0253002710
ISBN-13: 9780253002716
ISBN-10: 025322053X
ISBN-13: 9780253220530
Susanne Langer (1895 -- 1985) was once one among American philosophy's so much exact thinkers. Her philosophy used to be a deep exploration of human existence as a non-stop strategy of meaning-making via symbolic varieties. the following, Robert E. Innis brings readers in the direction of Langer's special and nuanced account of the symbolic brain. Innis exhibits how Langer's suggestion spans the sciences, aesthetics, psychology, faith, schooling, and tune, and the place it touches on matters that have been introduced ahead by means of American pragmatists akin to John Dewey and William James. Innis finds Langer's extreme concentrate on making which means transparent as he covers her whole philosophical profession. Highlighting what's of everlasting price to American philosophy in Langer's paintings, he determines precisely what her positions have been and why she proposed them. Readers will discover a willing appreciation for and significant appraisal of Langer's detailed philosophical imaginative and prescient.
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Extra info for Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind (American Philosophy)
Example text
The shifts, the changes of logical Gestalt, are unpredictable” (PP 218). The task of philosophy, as well as of art, then, is to develop, analogous to the “mechanic’s feel” discussed by Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974: 323–324), “true expertness in recognizing universal forms, in fi nding world-patterns” (PP 215). These world-patterns are embodied in symbolic forms. World-patterns are interpretations that themselves need, from the philosophical side, to be interpreted and ordered.
Langer will mine a very different set of “sources” here, especially French works from the fi rst third of the twentieth century, which we will examine in a later chapter. One will not be surprised by Langer’s later focusing on the imagination. An account of imagination is, indeed, demanded for a coherent expansion of the early formulated frame. For how else could one see possibilities in and beyond actual experience? The notion of living form, of the vital image, which will play such a role in Mind, is likewise not thematically present in The Practice of Philosophy.
Rather than a metaphysics of mind and art that trod a purely formal and abstract path, she ended up pursuing a semiotics of mind and art and of all symbolic forms, but a semiotics distinctively, though not uniquely, her own. It was a semiotics grounded empirically in the psychology of perception and of imagination and in a fruitful exploitation of theoretical and practical sources far removed from “traditional” philosophy. The “practice” of philosophy for Langer already entailed a “transformation” of philosophy.
Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind (American Philosophy) by Robert E. Innis
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