ABSTRACT
Frank Sibley was born in Lowestoft in England and after war service as a tank commander went to Oxford to read modern languages. There, under the influence of Ryle, Grice, George Paul and Austin, the atmosphere of whose philosophical work was lastingly to imbue his thinking, he became interested in philosophy and in philosophical aesthetics. Already as an undergraduate, deeply influenced by the careful attention to the use of language advocated by his mentors he became convinced that the clue to understanding problems in aesthetics lay in the careful investigation of what he later called “praise words,” “merit and demerit terms” and “aesthetic terms.” During 1948 and 1949 he collected vast lists of these from various works of criticism found in Oxford libraries. He sorted these into types and began to explore their relationships. This informed his teaching during the 1950s in the USA and equipped him with the extraordinary range of examples and counterexamples for which his interventions in discussions were so notable. It also led to his first and lastingly influential major contribution to aesthetics, “Aesthetic Concepts” (Sibley 2001). He once observed that he was doing analytical aesthetics before anyone else,
aesthetics at that time being still under the influence of neo-idealism. Some have claimed that he was set on his course by Austin’s often quoted remark that in aesthetics it might be profitable to concentrate on modest enquiries into terms like “dainty” and “dumpy” (Austin 1957). But by 1957, Sibley had been pursuing such enquiries for over ten years. And, another historical note, he could not, as some have claimed, have been influenced by Wittgenstein’s remarks on aesthetics. These appeared in 1966, many years after the first of Sibley’s major papers. In analytic aesthetics he was an original. His own inaugural lecture put his position succinctly:
It becomes clear that our common language, flexible, varied and evolved to deal with the complexities of various subject matters, proves, if we explore it with care, to be a repository of conceptual distinctions and discriminations we are able to make and an antidote to false models and simple assimilations.
