It is with great pleasure and gratitude that I accepted the invitation from my friend Robby George to speak here, under the auspices of the Madison Program, about my work. It was in this very university, nearly forty years ago, that I discovered my vocation. I had been invited to take up a semester-long fellowship with the Council for the Humanities; and I was to give a course of graduate seminars in the philosophy of architecture, based on the book that I was currently writing. That book, The Aesthetics of Architecture, published by Princeton University Press in the same year, 1979, has remained in print ever since, and it defined my subsequent path as a writer. I was to be a professional philosopher, a member of the analytical school of thinking that has been such a distinguished presence here in Princeton. But I was also to be an advocate of high culture, a champion of art, literature and music against the real and imaginary philistines. I was to teach, as a university professor, in the realm of abstract argument; but I was to live and write in the realm of concrete experience, where art reigns supreme.
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