Of Mind and Other Matters

by Goodman, Nelson

• ISBN13: 9780674631267
• ISBN10: 0674631269
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1987-10-15
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

Of Mind and Other Matters displays perhaps more vividly than any one of Nelson Goodman's previous books both the remarkable diversity of his concerns and the essential unity of his thought.Many new studies are incorporated in the book, along with material, often now augmented or significantly revised, that he has published during the last decade. As a whole the volume will serve as a concise introduction to Goodman's thought for general readers, and will develop its more recent unfoldings for those philosophers and others who have grown wiser with his books over the years.Goodman transcends the narrow "scientism and humanism that set the sciences and the arts in opposition"; his insights derive from both formal philosophy and cognitive psychology. As Hilary Putnam has noted, Goodman "prefers concrete and partial progress to grand and ultimately empty visions"; and here are illuminating studies of topics ranging from science policy and museum administration and art education to narrative in literature and painting and the analysis of elusive aspects of literal and metaphorical reference. All these are ramifications of Goodmanrs"s profound and often revolutionary philosophical work on the ways we understand and even make the worlds we live in.

Table of Contents

Thought

Science and Sin

Love and Understanding

Knowing through Seeing

On Reconceiving Cognition

Can Thought be Quoted?

On Thoughts without Words

Things

Notes on the Well-Made World

On Starmaking

Determined Materialism

Worlds of Individuals

Reference

Routes of Reference

Metaphor as Moonlighting

Splits and Compounds

Reference in Art

Depiction as Denotation

Statements and Pictures

About Truth About

Art in Theory

Twisted Tales

The Telling and the Told

Fiction for Five Fingers

Three Types of Realism

On Being in Style

On Symptoms of the Aesthetic

Virtue Confined

On the Identity of Works of Art

Implementation of the Arts

Art in Action

Notes from the Underground

Explorations in Art Education

A Message from Mars

Art and Ideas

The End of the Museum?

Appendix: Conversation with Frans Boenders and Mia Gosselin

Sources and Acknowledgments

Name Index

Subject Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.