A complete collection of Frank Sibley's articles on philosophical aesthetics, this volume includes five, remarkable, hitherto unpublished papers written in Sibley's later years. It addresses many topics, among them the nature of aesthetic qualities versus non-aesthetic qualities, the relation of aesthetic description to aesthetic evaluation, the different levels of evaluation, and the objectivity of aesthetic judgement. The later papers constitute both a significant development of Sibley's individual approach to aesthetics, such as his discussion of the distinction between attributive and predicative (...) uses of adjectives and of the aesthetic significance of tastes and smells, a topic Sibley considered to be much neglected. (shrink)

Deals with the question of the genesis of the concept of the aesthetic: where does it originate? In partial response to this question, Sibley attempts to show just how widespread the aesthetic interests of ordinary people are, especially if juxtaposed to the fairly restricted, minority interest in the highly developed arts, and emphasises the natural basis of our primitive aesthetic responses. Sibley concludes that, while the project of determining the logical priority of either the artistic or the aesthetic may be (...) confused, investigations in aesthetics should focus at least as much on the nature and origins of primitive aesthetic satisfactions as on the more recherché questions about arts. (shrink)

Discusses the notion of ugliness, a notion that Sibley believes to be of considerable interest to aestheticians, even if seldom discussed. Sibley attempts to clarify the concept and argues, with the general argument of Ch. 12 and the background view that ‘beautiful’ is not always attributive, established in Ch. 13, that ‘ugly’ is indeed attributive and not merely a tacit comparison.

Summarises the argument of ch. 12 and applies its conclusion about adjectives in general to aesthetic adjectives like ‘beautiful’, ‘graceful’, ‘pretty’ or ‘elegant’. Sibley’s suggestion is that some aesthetic judgements are legitimately predicative, that is to say, some things can legitimately be judged, e.g. beautiful without ‘beautiful’ being used predicatively: one need not know what the things are because the nouns or concepts in question set no restrictive standards vis-à-vis beauty or beauty-giving properties. With nouns that do set standards incorporating (...) notions of appropriateness, aesthetic judgements are attributive. (shrink)

Discusses Geach’s contrast between ‘logically predicative’ and ‘logically attributive’ adjectives. Sibley argues that Geach conflates two distinctions, one of which, between those predicates that can be split up and those that cannot, are of high relevance to the nature of aesthetic terms. Thus ‘x is a red car’ splits into a pair of predications ‘x is red’ and ‘x is a car’, whereas ‘x is a big flea’ does not split up into ‘x is big’ and ‘x is a flea’. (...) While Sibley rejects Geach’s own umbrella test for essentially attributive adjectives, he proposes, rather tentatively, that in the proposition ‘x is A’, when ‘A’ is an essentially attributive adjective, one must understand some class of things, without necessarily knowing the noun by which they are called. (shrink)

In Professor Ryle's words, the aim of the book is to offer "what may with reservations be described as a theory of the mind". But it claims to give no new information about minds but rather to "rectify the logical geography of the knowl- edge which we already possess". The need for rectification comes from a fundamental error underlying the generally accepted or official doctrine about the nature and status of Mind, a doctrine which hails chiefly from Descartes. This doctrine (...) "is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category-mistake". Hence it is wrong to speak of Minds and Bodies as if they are similar kinds of things that can be coupled in the same phrase; wrong to suppose that there are mental events which are hidden and unwitnessable counterparts of bodily events; wrong to suppose that our mental activities and characters are never known to other people because private and accessible in some privileged way only to ourselves. This is the large and radical undertaking to which Professor Ryle addresses himself. After a description of the Cartesian "myth" and a statement in detail of the nature of the general error underlying it, there follows a series of attempts to grapple with particular aspects of mental life, with the aim of showing in each case why the "official" doctrine is untenable and that mental concepts must be understood in quite a different way. (shrink)

F. N. Sibley; VIII—Colours, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 68, Issue 1, 1 June 1968, Pages 145–166, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/68.1.1.

Tackles the neglected question of whether tastes and smells can be objects of aesthetic interest, appreciation, satisfaction, and value. Bypassing the question of whether the objects of tasting and smelling are works of art, Sibley states that it is not the case that tastes and smells are wholly excluded from the realm of the aesthetic, that is to say, that they do not necessarily lack those features that would make them eligible in such a way that aesthetic judgements or descriptions (...) of them are possible. Sibley offers a variety of considerations in favour of the view that tastes and smells meet some of the demands we typically impose on objects if viewed in the context of aesthetic evaluation. Since, furthermore, no suitable candidate presents itself to serve as a criterion of demarcating the aesthetic and the sensuous, and since, consequently, these domains have to be understood as merging along a continuum, the diverse intersections between the two permit of some aesthetic evaluation of the sensuous. (shrink)

Challenges the assumption that paintings and sculptures are identical with physical objects and that, as a consequence, they are not subject to the type-token distinction. Since our knowledge and appreciation of vast ranges of art depends upon copies, on prints, on illustrated art books that most lovers of painting own, on colour slides and television programmes, it seems that there is no strong case for denying that reproductions of the Mona Lisa are tokens of a type. This claim goes beyond (...) the view that with increasing accuracy in reproduction of art objects, the closer we get to what is valuable – Sibley thinks we are already there. He concludes that either the concept we have of a painting may be internally inconsistent or that there may be two concepts of painting, one in which the work of art is identical with a physical object and the other in which it admits the type-token distinction. (shrink)