This Day in Philosophy — 7 August: Tagore dies, Goodman is born

7 August brings together, in the philosophical calendar, two names that stand a very long way apart.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 7 August 1941)#

The Bengali poet, composer and thinker Tagore was, in 1913, the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. But he was not only a poet: what he wrote on education, on nationalism and on man's relation to nature carried him into the intellectual arguments of the twentieth century as well.

Tagore's critique of nationalism is still cited. The nation state, as he saw it, is a form of organisation that turns a human being into a part of a machine; the traffic between cultures, by contrast, is a value in itself. Because the view was set down at the fiercest moment of the independence struggle, it provoked hard argument in India; the courteous disagreement with Gandhi developed along the same axis.

Visva-Bharati, the school he founded, was an experiment in a conception of education that put learning in the open air, in contact with nature, in place of learning within classroom walls.

Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906 – 1998)#

The American philosopher Nelson Goodman transformed two separate fields of analytic philosophy at once.

The new riddle of induction. In Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1954) he constructed the famous example of "grue". Consider a predicate of the following sort: an object is "grue" if it has been examined before a certain date and found green, or examined after that date and found blue. Every emerald we have seen so far confirms the predicate "green" and the predicate "grue" alike. Why, then, do we suppose that future emeralds will be green rather than grue?

What Goodman showed was this: induction cannot be grounded on the number of observations alone. The question of which predicates are fit for generalisation belongs not to logic but to language and habit.

The languages of art. Languages of Art (1968), for its part, treats the work of art as a system of signs. On Goodman's account, a picture does not represent by way of resemblance; representation, like language, is an established relation of reference. And the real question the book asks is not "what is art?" but "when is art?"