Susanne Katherina Langer (/ˈlæŋər/; née Knauth; December 20, 1895 – July 17, 1985) was an American philosopher, writer, and educator known for her theories on the influences of art on the mind.

She married William Leonard Langer, a fellow student at Harvard, in 1921, and in the same year the couple took their studies to Vienna, Austria.

[8] Susanne Langer brought to the fore previously unexplored ideas about the connection of consciousness and aesthetics in striking prose, bringing her serious scholarly attention and respect that allowed her to forge a career as an academic philosopher in the wake of her divorce and the pressures it put on her.

[10] Langer's philosophy explored the continuous process of meaning-making in the human mind through the power of "seeing" one thing in terms of another.

For Langer, the human mind "is constantly carrying on a process of symbolic transformation of the experiential data that come to it", causing it to be "a veritable fountain of more or less spontaneous ideas".

[14] Langer's analysis of this internal contextualization within a work of art led her to claim it was "nonsense" to think "form could be abstracted logically" from content.

For Langer, the virtual is not only a matter of consciousness, but something external that is created intentionally and existing materially as a space of contemplation outside of the human mind.

Langer sees virtuality as a physical space created by the artist, such as a painting or a building, that is "significant in itself and not as part of the surroundings".

[18] In her later years, Langer came to believe that the decisive task of her work was to construct a science- and psychology-based theory of the "life of the mind" using process philosophy conventions.

She explains that early organisms underwent refining through natural selection, in which certain behaviors and functions were shaped in order for them to survive.

[10] Susanne Langer's work with symbolism and meaning has led to her association with contemporary rhetoric, although her influence in the field is somewhat debated.

[9] According to Arabella Lyon, professor at State University of New York, Langer holds that meaning arises from the relationship between a community, its discourse, and the individual.

She shared Whitehead's belief in going beyond the limitations of scientific research and believed that along with the new-found thinking and ideas that had initiated the modern era in science and philosophy, the opportunity for a rebirth of philosophical creativity would arise.

She stated, "It is a peculiar fact that every major advance in thinking, every epoch-making new insight, springs from a new type of symbolic transformation".

[8] Susanne Langer had an influence in many fields: for example, she has been cited by psychologist Abraham Maslow in Motivation and Personality (1954), by urban planner Kevin A. Lynch in The Image of the City (1960), by inventor William J. J. Gordon in Synectics (1961), by philosopher (epistemology and aesthetics) Louis Arnaud Reid in Ways of Knowledge and Experience (1961), by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), by art scholar Ellen Dissanayake in Homo Aestheticus (1992), and by digital media theorist Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997).