Katherine Everett Gilbert

Background

Gilbert, Katherine Everett was born on July 29, 1886 in Newport, Rhode Island, United States.

Education

Brown and Cornell Universities. lifts: Literary influences: Plato, Aristotle, M. Blondel. B. Croce, Virginia Woolf and Ruskin. Personal: Helmut Kuhn and James Edwin Leighton.

Career

1915-1919, Editorial Assistant, Philosophical Review, 1922-1930, Research Fellow then (1928) Acting Professor, then (1929) Lecturer in Philosophy, University of North Carolina. 1930-1951, Professor of Philosophy, then (1942) Chair of the Department of Aesthetics, Art and kfusic, Duke University. 1947-1948. President of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Views

Gilbert was one of the outstanding American aesthcticians of the first half of the present century and one of the first women to be a full Professor at an American University. Her philosophy of art was 'not the result of manipulating abstract relations nor of fixating pure essences, but of the natural wonder about things going on around us in the arts’. She believed that the philosopher needs the constant aid of the richer and finer analysis of detail of the art critic. In the monumental and acclaimed History of Esthetics (1939) Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn set out to discover what art and beauty mean, and arrived at the conclusion that their meaning is not ‘within any four corners of any one or two propositions’, but ‘within the dialectic of the whole manifold of philosophical systems and styles’. Gilbert wrote on many other subjects, including architecture, poetics and the function of imagination. Like Ruskin she refused to separate any one aspect of life from any other. Neglect of her work in the latter half of the twentieth century was probably due to the development of a general aversion to synoptic philosophies.

Interests

• History of aesIhetics. Poetry and poetics; philosophy of feeling.