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collection of Frank Sibley's articles on philosophical aesthetics, this volume includes five, remarkable, hitherto unpublished papers written in Sibley's later years.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)

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.

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)

The irreversibility effect implies that a decision maker who neglects the prospect of receiving more complete information at later stages of a sequential decision problem will in certain cases too easily take an irreversible decision, as he ignores the existence of a positive option value in favour of reversible decisions. This option value represents the decision maker's flexibility to adapt subsequent decisions to the obtained information. In this paper we show that the economic models dealing with irreversibility as used in (...) environmental and capital investment decision making can be extended to emergency response decisions that produce important irreversible effects. In particular, we concentrate on the decision whether or not to evacuate an industrial area threatened by a possible nuclear accident. We show in a simple two-period evacuation decision model that non-optimal conclusions may be drawn when evacuation is regarded as a `now or never decision'. The robustness of these results is verified by means of a sensitivity analysis of the various model parameters. The importance of `options thinking' in this decision context is illustrated in an example. (shrink)

The potential negative impact of sexualized video games on attitudes toward women is an important issue. Studies that have examined this issue are rare and contain a number of limitations. Therefore, it largely remains unclear whether sexualized video games can have an impact on attitudes toward women. This study examined the consequences of sexualized video game content and cognitive load on rape victim blame and rape perpetrator blame, and whether the degree of humanness of the victim and of the perpetrator (...) mediated these effects. Participants played a video game using sexualized or non-sexualized female characters. Cognitive load was manipulated by setting the difficulty level of the game to low or high. After gameplay, participants read a rape date story, and were then asked to judge the victim’s and the perpetrator’s degree of responsibility and humanness. Based on the General Aggression Model, it was hypothesized that playing the video game with a sexualized content would increase the responsibility assigned to the victim and diminish the responsibility assigned to the perpetrator. Further, degree of humanness of the victim and the perpetrator was expected to mediate this relation. The results were partially consistent with these predictions: Playing a video game containing sexualized female characters increased rape victim blame when cognitive load was high, but did not predict degree of humanness accorded to the victim. Concerning the perpetrator, video game sexualization did not influence responsibility, but partly influenced humanness. This study concludes that video games impact on attitudes toward women and this, in part, due to its interactive nature. (shrink)

El estudio buscó evaluar los niveles de dominio de las competencias investigativas en posgraduados de Perú y Ecuador desde un enfoque pedagógico socioformativo. Se desarrolló bajo el método deductivo de alcance descriptivo. El análisis de los resultados ubica a los posgraduados de ambos países en el nivel medio o resolutivo, lo cual indica que existen competencias aceptables y suficientes para investigar, pero no logran expresarse eficientemente ni de manera creativa e innovadora. Asimismo, existen limitaciones en el afrontamiento de distintas competencias (...) inherentes a la investigación científica. (shrink)

In this article I explore two accounts of the Fallacy of Many Questions made famous by the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" The accounts are from the works of Lennart Aqvist and Noel Belnap, and the two authors differ in their accounts of the fallacy. Then I give my own account based on understanding a facet of erotetic logic, i. e., the logic of questions.

In his influential paper, ‘General Criteria and Reasons in Aesthetics’, Frank Sibley outlines what is taken to be a generalist view (shared with Beardsley) such that there are general reasons for aesthetic judgement, and his account of the behaviour of such reasons, which differs from Beardsley's. In this paper my aim is to illuminate Sibley's position by employing a distinction that has arisen in meta-ethics in response to recent work by Jonathan Dancy in particular. Contemporary research involves (...) two related yet distinct debates: (i) that between the particularist and the generalist on the status of moral principles; and (ii) that between holists and atomists on the nature of reasons. This division of labour has no correlate within the aesthetic particularism–generalism debate, and I will show how the ideas developed in relation to meta-ethics illuminate a difficulty with Sibley's view. I argue that we should understand Sibley as subscribing to both particularism and a version of holism about aesthetic reasons. (shrink)

Anna Bergqvist claims that Frank Sibley—despite his own claims to the contrary—should be considered a particularist when it comes to aesthetics. In this paper I argue that whilst Sibley does hold many of the views that Dancy advances in his Ethics without Principles , Bergqvist is certainly wrong to present Sibley's position as ‘uncontroversially’ particularist. In fact, the relationship between Sibley's account of judgement in aesthetics and Dancy's ethical particularism serves to highlight several ambiguities involved (...) in the particularist–generalist debate as Bergqvist presents it. (shrink)

Haydar claim that Frank Sibley offers a criterion for distinguishing aesthetically valenced from non-aesthetically valenced properties. I argue that they have misunderstood what Sibley was doing and that he never even intended to offer any such criterion. They also argue that Sibley was wrong to claim that inherently aesthetic merits are reversible. They claim that aesthetic merits—for example, elegance—are irreversible and offer some arguments for their view. I produce a counterexample to their claim about elegance and (...) suggest that such counterexamples involving aesthetic merits are not difficult to come by. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.1 (2005) 105-118 [Access article in PDF] Sibley's Legacy Brandon Cooke Philosophy Department Auburn University Approach To Aesthetics, by Frank Sibley. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jerome Roxbee Cox, editors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, 280 pp., $45.00 hardcover. Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley, edited by Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, 239 pp., $49.95 hardcover. Unquestionably, (...) class='Hi'>Frank Sibley should be counted among those who helped return aesthetics to intellectual health and respectability as a proper field for philosophical investigation. He published no monographs outlining his views, but managed nonetheless to make highly influential contributions to research in aesthetics through a small number of papers. The two books under review in a sense are long overdue. Sibley died in 1996, before he could assemble a collection of his papers for publication in a single volume. Approach to Aesthetics is perhaps the next best thing — a collection of essays assembled and shaped by a highly conscientious editorial team. The book collects all of Sibley's published writings in aesthetics, together with a number of unpublished papers in various states of completion. The editors were confronted with the difficult question of what to do with many of these latter pieces. In the end, they made the unhappy but correct decision to leave out some work, which would have been of great interest but was still embryonic at the time of Sibley's death. But while we may not have in this volume the fullness of Sibley's mature thinking on aesthetics, the importance of its contribution to the literature is in no way diminished. Clarendon has published Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley as a companion to the collection of Sibley's work. It, too, is a valuable contribution, and evidence of Sibley's agenda-setting influence on subsequent work in aesthetics. First I shall explore some of the main themes of Sibley's thought in Approach to Aesthetics. Approach to Aesthetics "Aesthetic Concepts" leads off the collection. Sibley concentrates on two sorts of remarks we make in talking about art: those that "may be made by...anyone with normal eyes, ears, and intelligence," and those that require "the exercise of taste, perceptiveness, or sensitivity, of aesthetic discrimination or appreciation" (p. 1). Concepts in the second group are aesthetic [End Page 105] or taste concepts. Sibley notices that in support of aesthetic judgments, we often (but not always) adduce reasons which involve non-aesthetic concepts only. The question to ask, then, is just what is the relation between the two? Sibley remains deliberately uncommitted on the specific nature of the relation, except for the important claim that whatever it is, it is not condition-governed. That is, "there are no non-aesthetic features which serve in any circumstances as logically sufficient conditions for applying aesthetic terms" (p. 4). The claim is strict, and in the tradition which says that nothing can substitute for individual, spontaneous contact with an artwork to judge its aesthetic qualities; no application of principles will suffice. On the one hand, such a position makes aesthetic education quite an important task, if the distinctive qualities of artworks are out of reach even to those who are cognitively and perceptually well-equipped. And yet, if no rules or general standards can be brought to the experience of art, one might well wonder just how such an education is to be carried out. Sibley is aware of this tension. The solution lies first in realizing that the aesthetic terminology is not different in kind from "everyday" language. Even if in the art-related cases, some of those are deployed in metaphors, our understanding of their use here is deeply related to their ordinary uses. But then, what stops any one of us from seeing that a painting is imbalanced or lurid? Sibley describes the several ways in which the critic "gets his audience to see what he sees" (p. 18). These include pointing out salient non-aesthetic features, using the aesthetic terms themselves, making use of metaphors, contrasts, comparisons, and so on. In effect, the critic's... (shrink)

Frank Sibley's ideas have been particularly influential among contemporary philosophers interested in aesthetics. Most studies, however, have focused only on his earlier works. In this essay, I explore Sibley's account of the adjectives ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, paying particular attention to three papers that have only recently been published and that have not yet received adequate attention. In particular, I discuss his account of the adjective ‘beautiful’, which relies on the controversial notion of an aesthetic ideal. In addition, (...) I discuss an account of how aesthetic judgements may change in relation to our coming to know the kind of object being judged and whether, as Sibley maintains, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are asymmetric in the sense specified by the author. (shrink)

Exploring key topics in contemporary aesthetics, this work analyzes the issues that arise from the unique works of Frank Sibley (1923-1996), who developed a distinctive aesthetic theory through a number of papers published between 1955 and 1995. Here, thirteen philosophical aestheticians bring Sibley's insight into a contemporary framework, exploring the ways his ideas foster important new discussion about issues in aesthetics. This collection will interest anyone interested in philosophy, art theory, and art criticism.

Frank Sibley was a philosopher who achieved notably sharp, lucid analyses of fundamental issues in aesthetics. This lively collection witnesses to the continuing power of his ideas to stimulate fresh thinking in and beyond his field.

Frank Sibley was one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics of the last fifty years, whose published papers are required reading for serious students of the subject. Approach to Aesthetics will be welcomed both for bringing together these well known papers, and for its inclusion of new, previously unpublished papers. This timeless body of work will continue to demand and reward the attention of scholars and students.

What does it mean to describe a work of art as being ‘original’? Frank Sibley believed that works of art are not valued for their originality independently of their aesthetic value. He argued that a work may be described as being ‘original’ if it is innovative and also exhibits some further aesthetic value. In this essay, I argue against this conjunctive account of originality as some kind of innovation-plus-value. I claim that a work may be valued for and (...) described as being ‘original’ if the work serves as the origin of some wider movement within the art world. (shrink)

One intuition we have about critical discourse is that we can distinguish between aesthetic and non-aesthetic assertions. When we say that a composition has a quick tempo and makes much use of staccato, we are remarking upon non-aesthetic features of the work. When we say of the same composition that it is vibrant, we are, in some sense, referring to an aesthetic feature. How should we draw the line between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic features of a work, and what import (...) does the distinction have? Frank Sibley has famously claimed that there is a way to draw a line between our aesthetic and non-aesthetic terms, and moreover that the existence of this distinction supports the existence of realistic aesthetic properties. The ensuing discussions of Sibley’s claim indicate that whatever is at stake here is of great significance to aesthetics. (shrink)

Galasso (2024) reiterates the problem of medical research being grounded on data from people with European ancestry and subsequently describes efforts made by the All of Us Research Program in the...

It has often been claimed that adequate aesthetic judgements must be grounded in the appreciator's first-hand experience of the item judged. Yet this apparent truism is misleading if adequate aesthetic judgements can instead be based on descriptions of the item or on acquaintance with some surrogate for it. In a survey of responses to such challenges to the apparent truism, I identify several contentions presented in its favour, including stipulative definitions of ‘aesthetic judgement’, assertions about conceptual gaps between determinate aesthetic (...) properties and even the most perfect descriptions, and claims about the holistic and sensibility-relative character of aesthetic qualities and values. With reference to considerations advanced by Frank Sibley, Alan H. Goldman, and particularists and anti-particularists in meta-ethics, I contend that strong versions of the apparent truism lack sufficient warrant. Two successors are proposed, however. One reframes the thesis in terms of our contingently limited descriptive and theoretical capacities with regard to a subset of the aesthetic qualities of extraordinary works; the second involves a shift from epistemic to axiological matters: what even the most perfect descriptions cannot provide, and in some cases spoil, is our gauging of an item's inherent, experiential value. (shrink)

My paper examines a vital but neglected aspect of Frank Sibley's pioneering account of aesthetic concepts. This is the claim that many aesthetic qualities are such that they can be characterized adequately only by metaphors or ‘quasi-metaphors’. Although there is no indication that Sibley embraced it, I outline a radical, minimalist conception of the experience of perceiving an item as possessing an aesthetic quality, which, I believe, has wide application and which would secure Sibley's position for (...) those aesthetic qualities that conform to it. (shrink)

This paper investigates (modal) extensions of Heyting-Brouwer logic, i.e., the logic which results when the dual of implication (alias coimplication) is added to the language of intuitionistic logic. We first develop matrix as well as Kripke style semantics for those logics. Then, by extending the Gö;del-embedding of intuitionistic logic into S4, it is shown that all (modal) extensions of Heyting-Brouwer logic can be embedded into tense logics (with additional modal operators). An extension of the Blok-Esakia-Theorem is proved for this embedding.

We give reasons for our judgements of works of art. (2) Reasons are inherently general, and hence dependent on principles. (3) There are no principles of aesthetic evaluation. Each of these three propositions seems plausible, yet one of them must be false. Illusionism denies (1). Particularism denies (2). Generalism denies (3). We argue that illusionism depends on an unacceptable account of the use of critical language. Particularism cannot account for the connection between reasons and verdicts in criticism. Generalism comes in (...) two forms: reversible generalism is the thesis that there are meaningful generalizations in criticism that admit of exceptions; irreversible generalism is the thesis that such generalizations cannot admit of exceptions. It is argued that Frank Sibley's defence of reversible generalism cannot provide a criterion for distinguishing valenced from non-valenced properties, and thus fails. Irreversible generalism is correct: it is logically cogent and fits our critical practices. (shrink)

"Those who think they know George Dickie's views should be sure to read this book. They are in for some interesting surprises. Of course, those unfamiliar with Dickie's views will also learn a lot." --Anita Silvers, San Francisco State University In this book George Dickie presents a theory about how to judge a work of art--as opposed to a theory that explains why a particular work is defined as art. Focusing mainly on the writings of Monroe Beardsley and critically examining (...) the views of seven other philosophers and art critics--Paul Ziff, Frank Sibley, Nelson Goodman, Nicholas Wolterstorff, David Hume, Bruce Vermazen, and J. O. Urmson--Dickie synthesizes their insights to discover what can be derived from their theories. On this basis, he attempts to work out a theory of art evaluation--the first such book on this topic by a contemporary philosopher. Initially, the author outlines all possible theories of art evaluation, assuming that traditional evaluative notions are used. He identifies seven theory-types that fall under four general headings: imitation value theory, objective intrinsic value theories, subjective intrinsic value theory, and instrumental value theories. Dickie then discusses the historical development of the theory of art evaluation, examining the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers treated representation and other cognitive dimensions of art as artistic values. His thorough analysis of the work of other contemporary theorists argues for a theory of art evaluation derived from various strands of thought. (shrink)

In aesthetics there is a long tradition according to which beauty is the object of love. One construal of this suggests a sentimentalist theory of beauty: beauty just is the object of an emotion aptly described as love. The first step toward such a view would be to discern whether we can make sense of at least some kind of aesthetic affect as at least some kind of love. I suggest that we can by taking up a thought from (...) class='Hi'>Frank Sibley, according to whom aesthetic properties reflect non-aesthetic values that “go deep into human life and interests” or that “mean much to us” given the kinds of lives we live. I show how we might think that a variety of aesthetic affect represents its object as embodying life-affirming value and as such we can see a variety of aesthetic affect as a kind of love of life. It remains to be seen whether this can be leveraged into a theory of beauty narrowly construed. (shrink)

The paper considers the set ML 1 of first-order polymodal formulas the modal operators in which can be applied to subformulas of at most one free variable. Using a mosaic technique, we prove a general satisfiability criterion for formulas in ML 1 , which reduces the modal satisfiability to the classical one. The criterion is then used to single out a number of new, in a sense optimal, decidable fragments of various modal predicate logics.