Agata Kosicanova

The continual possibility of aesthetic experience throughout history has prompted philosophical reflections about its nature and meaning in human life. This article outlines some neuroscientific ways of understanding its functioning, focusing specifically on Susanne Langer’s contribution. Commonly subsumed under the heading ‘philosophy of mind’ – especially due to the trilogy Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling – Langer’s interests in the human mind developed already in the 1950s, as witnessed by the paper The Deepening Mind. A Half-Century of American Philosophy. Following these lines, the article discusses Langer’s philosophical approach from the perspective of a (neuro)aesthetic inquiry, emphasizing particularly the importance of the non-discursive realm of the mind. It also shows how Langer’s account might be seen as going beyond that of John Dewey, which is often referred to as an advancement in the historical development of neuroaesthetics.

The continual possibility of aesthetic experience throughout history has prompted philosophical reflections about its nature and meaning in human life. This article outlines some neuroscientific ways of understanding its functioning, focusing specifically on Susanne Langer’s contribution. Commonly subsumed under the heading ‘philosophy of mind’ – especially due to the trilogy Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling – Langer’s interests in the human mind developed already in the 1950s, as witnessed by the paper The Deepening Mind. A Half-Century of American Philosophy. Following these lines, the article discusses Langer’s philosophical approach from the perspective of a (neuro)aesthetic inquiry, emphasizing particularly the importance of the non-discursive realm of the mind. It also shows how Langer’s account might be seen as going beyond that of John Dewey, which is often referred to as an advancement in the historical development of neuroaesthetics.

One of the main article goals are going to be especially analytical, comparing as well as deductive English language specialised reflections of this philosopher and aesthetics-studious person together with our Slovak and Czech language sources. The part of our work is going to be also concentrated on the previous conferential reflections, but an addition of the next, not only her bookish and past characteristics, but also the current Internet ones, that are an integral part of our life and inevitable information sources, is going to be presented too. All these considerations´ result should be the following, closer Langer´s clarification in the 20th and 21st century aesthetics-philosophical world. Due to all the above mentioned ideas, the next article goal of the same interest relevance is going to happen the comparative current/modern authors theories of the philosophical-aesthetics art world insight, concerning the understood and reflected Susanne Langer´s part of her lifetime work so far. Our research should then be focused on closer assembling of our answer to the continually ongoing question about the philosophy of art and aesthetics´s meaning and message of this controversial american philosophical and aesthetics world figure.