Nelson Goodman, one of the 20th century's foremost philosophers, believed in the cognitive nature of art and viewed the arts as partners with the sciences. Pictures, the performing arts, and architecture shape our understanding just as mathematics and the sciences do. In his lecture, Ivan Gaskell will provide insights on Nelson's question, "When is art?"

Ivan Gaskell is Margaret S. Winthrop Curator of Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts in the Harvard University Art Museums and Senior Lecturer in History. His teachings and research concern the writing of history from artifacts (including artworks), philosophy of art and artifacts, museology, and relations among museum scholarship, history, art history, anthropology, and philosophy. He is author of Vermeer's Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums (2000) and joint editor of and contributor to a number of volumes in the series of Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the  Arts. Currently he is preparing books on discourses of exhibiting, and on writing history from American seventeenth through nineteenth-century artifacts.

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