PROGRAM
TUESDAY, 26 MAY 2026 – ARTISTIC ANGLES
Kuppelsaal, TU Wien
09:30 Registration
10:00 Introduction
Prof. Vera Bühlmann, Prof. Georg Schiemer, Dr. Lona Gaikis.
11:00-17:30 Plenary Sessions
19:00 Salomé Voegelin (CH/UK) PUBLIC KEYNOTE
Sonic Possible Worlds and the Desire for Philosophical Collaborations Across an Unmeasurable Time
20:00 “On the Resources of Feeling” PANEL DISCUSSION
Dr. Megan Poole, Dr. Krista Ratcliffe, Dr. Kyle Jensen and Prof. Adam Nocek.
Milena Georgieva (BG/AT) SOUNDSCAPE
WEDNESDAY, 27 MAY 2026 – PHILOSOPHICAL CIRCLES
Boecklsaal, TU Wien
09:30-17:30 Plenary Sessions & Posters
19:00 Dr. Sander Verhaegh (NL) PUBLIC KEYNOTE
Between Two Circles: Langer and the Making of American Analytic Philosophy
20:00 “Susanne K. Langer and the Vienna Circle” PANEL DISCUSSION
Prof. Juliet Floyd, Dr. Silke Körber and Dr. Sander Verhaegh.
Moderated by Dr. Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau (IVC) and Dr. Lona Gaikis.
THURSDAY, 28 MAY 2026 – POETIC DOTS
Boecklsaal, TU Wien
09:30-18:00 Plenary Sessions
19:30 Prof. Adam Nocek (USA) PUBLIC KEYNOTE
From Computability to Semblance: Susanne K. Langer on Artificial Aesthetics in Biology
Jakob Schauer (AT) SOUNDSCAPE
FRIDAY, 29 MAY 2026 – TECHNICAL LINES
Kuppelsaal, TU Wien
09:30-17:00 Plenary Sessions
Keynotes
Keynote Speaker
TUESDAY, 26 MAY 2026
SALOMÉ VOEGELIN:
Sonic Possible Worlds and the Desire for Philosophical Collaborations Across an Unmeasurable Time
This keynote takes the form of a curatorial performance, that is, it does not deliver a paper but performs ideas by playing sounds and reciting poetry, by reading texts and proposing text-scores, by moving and standing still, to bring art and its theorising into simultaneity, not to know systematically but to generate how we might know contingently from everything at once. This seems important to me particularly in relation to Susan K. Langer for whose philosophy I have a complex appreciation: admiring her identification of the problems of art theory in the 1940s, and her motivation to do things otherwise, while disagreeing with her sense that we can or should know art in a scientific way, particularly in the 1940s.
Inspired by this conflict, this keynote as curatorial performance engages the possibility of a co-generated philosophy and art. Recognising our desire for connections, which motivates a cross-time collaboration, and produces plural understandings of what we consider useful, relevant and real.
To do so, this curatorial performance turns to sound and engages the philosophy of sonic possible worlds: the imaginary of a plural world of invisible slices, all real simultaneously and legitimised in experience rather than through a singular and calculable world. It does so to discuss the aesthetics of a relational everything-at-once from which objectivity loses its distance and gains responsibility for what we hear not as outcome but as process, generating the work and the world in an unmeasurable time. And that is where I hope to re-meet Langer, in 2026, in the studio, without searching for scientific rigour but co-generating the possible impossibility of the work and the world: to see the actual and hear the possible expand its vision.
Panel Discussion
“On the Resources of Feeling”
Dr. Megan Poole (USA) in conversation with Dr. Krista Ratcliffe, Dr. Kyle Jensen, Prof. Adam Nocek.
This panel explores Susanne K. Langer’s innovative philosophy of feeling and symbolism and its significance for contemporary philosophy and rhetoric. Drawing on archival materials and canonical works, the presentations examine Langer’s influence on new materialist rhetoric, theorize a “nature’s punctum” of affective, sonic experience, and analyse the complexities of listening across her symbol theory. The session situates Langer’s account of feeling and consciousness alongside Kenneth Burke, offering new theoretical avenues for the study of form, motivation, and symbolic action in both the sciences and the humanities.
Dr. Megan Poole is an assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the intersection of rhetoric, science, and embodied experience. She is the author of Listening to Beauty: Rhetorics of Science in Sea and Sound (2025), a book that examines how encounters with beauty and wonder shape scientific discovery, drawing from interviews with leading biologists and stories of researchers’ experiences in the field. Poole’s work highlights the role of sensory engagement and aesthetic appreciation in expanding both the methodologies and possibilities of scientific knowledge.
Prof. Krista Ratcliffe is Foundation Professor of English at Arizona State University (ASU) specializing in rhetoric, feminist theory, and anti-racist critiques of whiteness as a constructed racial category. Known for her work on listening, she is the author of seven books, including Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (2006), co-author of Rhetorical Listening in Action: A Concept-Tactic Approach (2022), and co-editor of the collection Rhetorics of Whiteness (2016). Ratcliffe previously chaired English departments at ASU, Purdue University, and Marquette University, served as president of major rhetoric societies, and is recognized as a Rhetoric Society of America Fellow.
Prof. Kyle Jensen is Professor of English and Assistant Dean of AI & Emerging Digital Technologies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of six books including, most recently, Kenneth Burke’s Weed Garden (Penn State UP, 2022) and Rhetorical Listening in Action (with Krista Ratcliffe; Parlor, 2022).
With Prof. Adam Nocek (Thursday’s Keynote)
Keynote Speaker
WEDNESDAY, 27 MAY 2026
SANDER VERHAEGH:
Between Two Circles – Langer and the Making of American Analytic Philosophy
Historians of American philosophy often portray the analytic turn as a rupture. Richard Rorty wrote about a “take over” by European émigrés, who “showed up thanks to Hitler and various other historical contingencies”. Roy Wood Sellars described the analytic method as “a new kind of colonialism” led by Viennese scientists who knew little about American philosophy. This paper challenges this narrative, using the encounters between Langer and the Vienna Circle to argue that analytic philosophy should not be viewed as European export but as a product of transatlantic exchange. First, I draw on archival material to show that American philosophy already harboured a substantive community of proto-analytic philosophers, exemplified by Langer’s circle of philosopher-logicians, well before it developed contacts with the Vienna Circle. Next, I reconstruct how Langer and her contemporaries tried to bridge cultural differences by developing different proposals for how to characterise the new philosophy. Finally, I argue that neither Langer nor the logical empiricists were able to control the narrative, focusing on the social mechanisms that contributed to the rise of a conception of analytic philosophy that still dominates the field today.
Panel Discussion
“Susanne K. Langer and The Vienna Circle”
Prof. Juliet Floyd, Dr. Silke Körber and Dr. Sander Verhaegh.
Moderated by Dr. Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau (IVC) and Dr. Lona Gaikis.
Prof. Juliet Floyd, Boston University, is known for her expertise in the history and philosophy of logic, mathematics, and early analytic philosophy, with particular emphasis on Wittgenstein, Turing, and Langer. She is the author of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics (2021) and has further explored the philosophical implications of computation as co-editor of Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing: Turing 100 (with Alisa Bokulich, 2017). In 2024, she was keynote speaker at the conference Susanne K. Langer: Creativity and American Thought, and will introduce this year’s conference track “Philosophical Circles.”
Dr. Silke Körber is an independent scholar and External Research Fellow at the Institute Vienna Circle. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Humboldt University of Berlin, where she specialized in Otto Neurath’s theories of knowledge visualization. Having studied across major German universities, her interdisciplinary expertise spans Philosophy, German Studies, and Political Science, among others. Her current research focuses on the philosophy of science, analytic and feminist philosophy, and social-political theory.
Dr. Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau is a philosopher and historian at the Institut Wiener Kreis, University of Vienna. His research focuses on the origins and development of logical empiricism, the Vienna Circle, and debates around logic, mathematics, and representation with a special focus on the transition from psychologism to more formal, system-based approaches. Christoph is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Logical Empiricism (with Thomas Uebel, 2022) and co-author of The Vienna Circle: Texts and Pictures of Logical Empiricism (with Prof. Friedrich Stadler, 2015). He has published extensively on Wittgenstein, Carnap, Neurath, and Arthur Pap.
Dr. Lona Gaikis is an independent researcher and lecturer in the arts and philosophy. Lona Gaikis earned her doctoral degree (Dr. phil.) in Philosophy, Art, and Cultural Studies from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2017. Her research focused on the “new key” in the work of the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer and on the meaning of musics in artistic practice. Lona is the editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Susanne K. Langer (2024) and organiser of the 2026 Susanne K. Langer Conference in Vienna. Lona is a fellow at the Institute Vienna Circle during the spring term of 2026. She has researched Langer’s two stays in Vienna, in 1921/22 and 1933, and the academic environment of those periods
Keynote Speaker
THURSDAY, 28 MAY 2026
ADAM NOCEK:
From Computability to Semblance – Susanne K. Langer on Artificial Aesthetics in Biology
This talk attempts to situate technoscientific advancements in the biosciences in relation to Susanne K. Langer’s aesthetic biology. While precious little has been written about Langer’s art-infused biology, there seems to be even less to say about how Langer would respond to advances in computing technology – e.g., deep neural networks. This shouldn’t be surprising given that Langer does not offer a philosophy of technology, nor does she devote attention to theorizing technology as a symbolic form, as Ernst Cassirer did in Kunst und Technik. Despite this, the talk will show that Langer’s aesthetics are invaluable for reconfiguring the already fraught relation between artificial intelligence and biology. In doing so, the lecture offers a reconceptualization not only of artificial intelligence but also of Langer’s aesthetics, such that the latter can be brought to bear on computing and biology to resolve tensions within today’s technosciences.
Conference organiser: Dr. Lona Gaikis.
Committee: Prof. Vera Bühlmann (AT), Prof. Randall E. Auxier (USA), Prof. Christian Grüny (DE), Dr. Matthew Ingram (USA), Dr. Tereza Hadravová (CZ).
Funded by the Technical University of Vienna, the University of Vienna, City Council of Vienna Stadt Wien MA7 Kultur.