Susanne K. Langer.
- Friday, December 4, 2015
- 12:00pm – 1:00pm
- MAWA, 611 Main Street
How did a female philosopher revolutionize the philosophy of the arts? Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) was the first woman to establish a career as a university philosopher and the first woman to write a book on logics. This talk will examine what Langer introduced into philosophy—ideas that enabled her and later philosophers to articulate how art forms refer to reality or truth, particularly abstract ones like non-representational painting or music—and will raise the question, is there a female approach to the arts in philosophy? Or is that a derogatory cliché? Mahrenholz will explore whether and how women paved the way for topics like the body, expression, embodying, affects and a certain different logic within the arts and philosophy—an “analogical” or “analog” logic.
Free! Everyone welcome!
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Simone Mahrenholz is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba. She came to Winnipeg in 2011 after having taught at different universities and schools of art in Germany. Her main philosophical interests deal with questions such as: how do the arts convey knowledge, truth, revelation and cognition (Erkenntnis), and vice versa, what role do “aesthetic” deliberations play in the natural sciences? How might the answers to these questions revolutionize philosophical concepts of cognition, thinking, rationality, the mind-body relation and the thinking-feeling dualism? Much of her research deals with the philosophy of music and film and with existentialist topics relating to self-formation. Her most recent book (in German) is a study on the concept of creativity.