Frank Sibley (philosopher) - Work in Aesthetics

Work in Aesthetics

Most of Sibley's work in aesthetics is collected in Approach to Aesthetics. He is especially well known for his attempts to distinguish the domains of aesthetic and non-aesthetic. His 1959 paper "Aesthetic Concepts" is often referred as one of the landmarks of 20th century aesthetics in the tradition of analytic philosophy. The paper is rich in themes, but the main line of thought suggest that aesthetic concepts cannot be reduced to non-aesthetic concepts, or sufficiently defined in terms of non-aesthetic concepts. This leads Sibley to think that grasping properties of given items requires the capability to exercise taste or aesthetic sensibility.

Topics and problems relating to taste thus became very important to Sibley's approach, and he returned to them through his career. Also, Sibley did not see Aesthetics as remote from philosophy as whole. This is very clear from his brief programmatic note "About Taste", published in 1966 in British Journal of Aesthetics. Here Sibley states the situation thus:

"The programme that aestheticians must face is thus a large one, the charting of a huge areas neglected by other philosophers working within their customary bonds. Indeed, far from it's(sic) being true that aesthetics is peripheral to philosophy, aestheticians encounter ranges of concepts wider than and inevitably including of those studied by most other branches of philosophy."