SUSANNE K. LANGER: ARTISTIC ANGLES, PHILOSOPHICAL CIRCLES, POETIC DOTS, AND TECHNICAL LINES
Vienna, May 26-29, 2026
The conference will be held in person only at the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Vienna, Austria.
Keynote speakers: Salomé Voegelin (CH), Sander Verhaegh (NL), and Adam Nocek (USA).
The architectonic vernacular of angles, circles, dots, and lines composes the conceptual sketchpad that maps the theoretical edifice of Susanne K. Langer’s work in logic, the arts, a philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. This conference aims to explore Langer’s philosophical framework and invites scholars as well as artists to actuate her philosophical methods, spanning from logical analysis and synthesis to embodied cognition, symbolic projection and understanding.
Artistic Angles
Perceived widely as an artists’ philosopher, Susanne K. Langer’s thought has informed media-theoretical debates on the affective turn, conceptual undercurrents of carnal rhetorics and speculations in new materialism(s), providing a toolkit to capture the artefacts of expressiveness. This distinctive artistic angle for theory shapes Langer’s approach to the body-mind and to aesthetic cognition. Her philosophy, synthesizing Alfred N. Whitehead’s process metaphysics and Ernst Cassirer’s anthropology of symbolic forms, echoes later post-structuralist movements in its exploration of non-linguistic dimensions of meaning. These intersections situate Langer’s philosophy of artistic expressiveness as a mode of epistemological import.
Philosophical Circles
Langer’s orbital relationship with the Vienna Circle is exemplified in her 1930 book, The Practice of Philosophy (praised by Moritz Schlick), in which she was among the first to articulate the “’analytic` type” of philosophy (p. 17), well before its widespread adoption in the 1950s. She also played a key role in helping exiled Vienna Circle members (e.g. Herbert Feigl or Eugen T. Gadol) settle in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Establishing her own philosophical circle at Harvard, devoted to the discussion of logic, Langer bridged the transatlantic evolution of analytic philosophy. Her scholarly thinking blended empirical rigour and experiential meaning-making with process-oriented thought.
Poetic Dots and Technical Lines
Langer’s legacy – one that bridges philosophical and epistemic divides – invites a re-negotiation of living form; for Langer, mind is grounded in an intricate matrix of exogenic and autogenic processes that expand the idea of living and non-living entities, and the systems they are embedded in. The continued computational turn – advancements in algorithmic learning and synthetic biology – blur the contours of mechanics and organism, life and form.
This conference seeks to make tangible the poetic and technological transversality currently intersecting philosophy, science, and the arts.
Organized in collaboration with the Research Unit Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP at the Vienna University of Technology and the IVC Institute Vienna Circle at the University of Vienna, this conference illuminates the history and relevance of Susanne K. Langer’s philosophy—demonstrating how her thought continues in contemporary debates in philosophy, aesthetics, the arts, and science, and how it is linked to the city of ideas, Vienna.
For further information, visit the Langer Circle website: https://langercircle.sites.uu.nl/
Conference Committee: Prof. Vera Bühlmann (AT), Dr. Lona Gaikis (AT), Dr. Tereza Hadravová (CZ), Dr. Matthew Ingram (USA), Prof. Randall E. Auxier (USA), Prof. Christian Grüny (DE).
Selected conference proceedings will be published as an edited journal (TU Academic Press).
Previous Susanne K. Langer Circle conferences took place in 2022 at the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt a.M., and in 2024 at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.