ABSTRACT
"Aesthesis," Winfried Fluck observes, "means both the ability to perceive and the power to judge," but these two meanings, Fluck adds, "have been continuously conflated and confused in attacks on the concept of the aesthetic". Frank Sibley sets such verdicts aside in order to focus, instead, on the category of statements central to analytic aesthetics, statements that convey one's perceptions of objects: It is of importance to note first that, broadly speaking, aesthetics deals with a kind of perception. The conjunction of analytic aesthetics and literary criticism was exemplified in the influential partnership of W. K. Wimsatt, a critic of literature, and Monroe C. Beardsley, a student of aesthetics who, like Frank Sibley, was an important figure in the emergence of analytic aesthetics. As Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen have observed, "in 1958 the analytic school of aesthetics came of age with the publication of Monroe C. Beardsley's Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism".
