The words we use have a critical effect on the way we think and this is as true in the arts as in any other field. Witness for example my own concerns over the language of printmaking and how that language is being subverted by marketeers to sell reproductions. I was interested then to come across this passage in the book The" gp="">The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow.
At the time [the end of the 18th Century] ‘science’ meant knowledge; interest in the material world was ‘natural philosophy’. And when people spoke of the ‘arts’, they did not mean only the fine arts but also the ‘mechanic arts’, the skill s and techniques in agriculture, say, or printing. So the relationship of philosophy to the arts could mean the usefulness of natural knowledge to industry – almost the opposite of what we mean today.
