Susanne Langer was an American philosopher whose work remains significant because of her distinctive views on the philosophy of art, as expressed in her books Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and Feeling and Form (1953). Though now relatively neglected, various aspects of her views remain of interest, as shown by the following considerations concerning her most characteristic doctrines.

Langer rejects positivist views of meaning and thinking according to which only literal, scientific language has any objective significance—a view the consequence of which is that any other apparent kinds of meaning are mere subjective expressions of feeling (1957, ch. 4). Instead she argues that there is another kind of objective thinking that has a different kind of symbolic form. In place of the discursive, sequential structure of linguistic statements it uses a presentational symbolic mode, which communicates by showing rather than saying, as do images...