Susanne K. Langer (1895—1985) is an American philosopher. An omnivorous reader, fluent in several languages and philosophical traditions, she possessed an endlessly curious mind that ignored disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of synoptic vision. Langer occupies a place in two distinct intellectual worlds, neither of which was the one she was born into: the old tradition of grand philosophical systems, already gone, and the paradigm of interdisciplinarity and empirical inquiry in philosophy, not yet fully formed. She authored a philosophical bestseller early in her career Philosophy in a New Key (1942), yet her position in 20th-century American academia remained precarious—a reality shaped in part by her being a woman in a male-dominated field.

There are many varieties of cognitive aesthetics, and most of them share the idea that art is connected with knowledge, understanding, or sense-making. Philosophers differ in how they understand both the content of this knowledge and its bearer. Cognitive aesthetics may also refer more broadly to approaches that bring philosophical aesthetics into dialogue with cognitive science, especially theories of perception, emotion, embodiment, and the enactive mind. Langer’s own work was deeply engaged with the scientific theories of her time, which she critically absorbed and integrated into her philosophical account of human mentality. Her aesthetics can also be understood in cognitivist terms: we argue that Langer’s cognitivism focuses on art forms rather than individual artworks and concerns the development of the human mind.

At a time when in the English-speaking world psychology was dominated by the image of the mind as a black box, and philosophy of mind analyzed consciousness in terms of so-called mental states corresponding to propositional attitudes, Langer offered an image of subjectivity that was far more complex and nuanced. Her reflections on the interweaving of mind and art remain relevant and inspiring to this day.

The influence of Langer’s philosophy on both her contemporaries and later thinkers remains underexplored. She was well regarded in artistic, dance, and musical circles, and was cited by figures such as Guy Anderson, Martha Graham, and Jonas Mekas. Yet she had no explicit followers within philosophy. In this project, we seek to trace both the visible and more subtle connections between Langer and American philosophers who encountered her work in their formative years, such as Nelson Goodman and Arthur C. Danto.

The project lasts for three years (2025–2027) and we plan to publish research papers in academic journals, a translation of selected Langer’s work in Czech, and a monograph on Langer in English.