Book Summary:
The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling is a presentation of the philosophy of Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) against the background of major advances in twentieth-century European and American thought. Langer is one of the most original and fertile American thinkers of the twentieth century, yet her work is still insufficiently recognized and frequently misunderstood. To illuminate the evolution and shape of Langer’s thought, this book focuses on her four most formative sources: her mentors Henry Sheffer and Alfred N. Whitehead, and the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This reveals how her thinking was not only forged out of a critical engagement with significant intellectual traditions of her time but also anticipated many of the major developments and philosophical ‘turns’ of ours. Her original and innovative thought crosses the customary boundaries between analytic and continental philosophy, and places aesthetics not at the margins of philosophy but at its very centre.
Short Bio:
Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Research Associate at the Margaret Beaufort Institute in Cambridge. She works on the interface of philosophical and theological aesthetics and has taught and published widely in those areas. She is the co-author of Art and Soul: Signposts for Christians in the Arts, published by IVP in 2001.
Originally from the Netherlands, Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin studied philosophy, art history and musicology in Amsterdam - while spending her final year at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto to study with Calvin Seerveld - before moving to live and work in the UK. Between 1999 and 2007 she taught philosophical aesthetics at the graduate school the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto during which time she was also an adjunct faculty member of the Toronto School of Theology. She served as President of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics from 2005 until 2007 and subsequently as their Canadian delegate on the Executive Committee of the International Association of Aesthetics. Upon her move to the UK she worked as an independent scholar with various temporary lectureships including a one-year appointment as Teaching Fellow in Religion, Philosophy and the Arts at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College in London in 2016-2017.
She has a special interest in public and socially engaged art and is the founding curator of the travelling exhibition Art, Conflict and Remembering: the Murals of the Bogside Artists which has been hosted by several cathedrals and universities in the UK, as well as organisations promoting peace and social justice. Her book The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling was published by Bloomsbury in 2020.