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Quote by Susanne Katherina Langer

“Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.”

Quote by Susanne Katherina Langer

Author

Susanne Katherina Langer

Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher of German birth, renowned for her work in aesthetics, semiotics, cognitive psychology, and philosophical anthropology. Her contributions have had a profound impact on 20th-century philosophy. more

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“It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.”

Mind Real Facts Age Culture Higher Standards Criticism Historical Destroyed Realistic Historian Mathematician Physicist Apostles Orientation

Author:Susanne Katherina Langer

“Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.”

Ifs Knows Men Heart Use Reality Faces Known Emotional Sacred Favors Practicals Reactions Esteem Symbols Altered Emotional Reactions

Author:Susanne Katherina Langer

“Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.”

Thinking Creatures

Author:Susanne Katherina Langer

“Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.”

Thinking Real Matter Light Language Genuine Primitive

Author:Susanne Katherina Langer

“Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.”

Two Ideas Facts Wisdom Mankind Circles Focal Point

Book:Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

“The faith of scientists in the power and truth of mathematics is so implicit that their work has gradually become less and less observation, and more and more calculation.... But the facts which are accepted by virtue of these tests are not actually observed at all.”

Facts Virtue Tests Scientist Mathematics Accepted Observation Calculations Implicit

Author:Susanne Katherina Langer

“The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.”

Doe Facts Individual Process Known Events Unique Aim Patterns Links Historian Hypothetical

Author:Susanne Katherina Langer

“The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".”

“The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology.”

World Real Materials Errors Physics Mathematical Conception Real World Organs Primitive Abstraction Epistemology

Author:Susanne Katherina Langer

“To trace the development of mind from earliest times ... requires ... not a categorical concept, but a functional one.... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.”

Mind Purpose Principles Development Concepts Individuation

Author:Susanne Katherina Langer