Approach to Aesthetics

Book excerpt: Approach to Aesthetics is the complete collection of Frank Sibley's articles on philosophical aesthetics. Their appearance within a single volume will be welcome to scholars and students of aesthetics. The value of the book is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of five substantial papers written in his later years and hitherto unpublished. Most of the published papers are concerned with a group of related topics: the nature of aesthetic qualities and their relation to non-aesthetic qualities, the relation of aesthetic description to aesthetic evaluation, the different levels of evaluation, the objectivity of aesthetic judgement. The later papers constitute both a continuation and a significant development of Sibley's individual approach to aesthetics. One group of papers discusses the distinction between attributive and predicative uses of adjectives, first elucidating the distinction, and then considering its application to 'beautiful' and 'ugly'. Another major paper is an extensive study of the aesthetic significance of tastes and smells, a topic Sibley considered to be much neglected, whose examination could throw interesting light on the boundaries of the concept of the aesthetic. This collection constitutes a wide ranging yet coherent account of aesthetics by one of the most acute philosophical minds of his generation, one which is and will continue to be a source of controversy and a model of analytical method.