Arte ed estetica in Nelson Goodman

The philosophic and epistemological contributions of Nelson Goodman (1906-98), one of the most important analytical philosophers, are widely known and studied. However, his writings on art are, to this day, mostly approached from a semiotic point of view. The aim of the present volume is to foreground the “aesthetic” horizon of his thought. The dimension of aisthesis, in fact, became more and more central to his work, revealing a shift from epistemology to aesthetics which culminated in his notion of “philosophy as understanding”. Goodman thus opens the analytical tradition to an aesthetic dimension, offering a unitary vision of the different symbolic and artistic productions, as well as of knowledge. Art is not an expression of a meaning to be found elsewhere, nor an activity for its own sake. Rather, it is a form of understanding, and the aesthetic experience is not limited to the appreciation of a supposed world of artifacts, but rather enables understanding and experience. This volume addresses some of the major theoretical concerns of Goodman’s aesthetic approach: the problem of representation and that of “fictions” as productive of “objects of experience”; his critique of “resemblance theories” and his going beyond Peirce’s distinction between “natural” and “conventional” signs; the functionalist response to the debate on whether or not art is definable; the “symptoms of the aesthetic”; the intransitiveness and particularity of the work of art; the distinction between “autographic” and “allographic”, as well as between “copy” and “replica”; the notion of “activation” and the relationship of identity-difference between work of art and object; the relationship between the emotional and the cognitive, and the reconception of “knowledge” in terms of “understanding”.