Nelson Goodman (1906-1998) was for most of his career best known as a philosopher of science, but he had a long-standing interest in art and began to write about aesthetics in the 1960s. The articles we will discuss on Wed. and Fri. were published at about the same time as his two books on art and reflect their content. This article comes later and presents some ideas from each of his books.
• The ideas it presents from his first book on art are the four sorts of reference listed on p. 644 and illustrated with architectural examples (pp. 644-649). We will spend most of our time discussing this part of the article.
• The rest of the article touches on issues more closely related to Goodman’s second book (and the article we will discuss on Friday) on pp. 649-652. Think here about what he says about the “rightness” of architecture (pp. 651f), and notice the idea of judging the rightness of works of art as “world construals” (p. 650).
Goodman mentions Schopenhauer’s discussion of architecture (p. 642). That appears in §43 of the The World as Will and Idea; although I didn’t assign it, it is included in Hofstadter and Kuhns (pp. 468-472). Goodman doesn’t mention Hegel but you should recall him, too, since he has his own views about the sort of meaning to be found in architecture.