Quotes from book
Philosophy in a New Key

Name: Philosophy in a New Key
Author: Susanne K. Langer

Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art is the main work of American philosopher Susanne K. Langer, first published in 1941. In it she declares that "Symbolism was the ‘new key’ to understanding how the human mind transformed the primal need to express oneself."

“It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age. Science builds its structure of hypothetical "elements" and laws of their behavior, touching on reality at crucial points.... But the historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.”

Susanne K. Langer book Philosophy in a New Key

Philosophy in a New Key (1941)

“The men in the laboratory… cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all. …The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper. …What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions.”

Susanne K. Langer book Philosophy in a New Key

Philosophy in a New Key (1942)

“If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.”

Susanne K. Langer book Philosophy in a New Key

Philosophy in a New Key (1941)

“Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.”

Susanne K. Langer book Philosophy in a New Key

Source: Philosophy in a New Key (1942), Ch. 10, p. 216