Abstract
Beauty and ugliness are among the traditional and elemental aesthetic categories. In contemporary vocabulary, they are terms we use primarily in the framework of aesthetic evaluation, when trying to express the aesthetic nature of what we relate to (aesthetically).
Other uses and meanings of these terms are then considered to be derived or transferred. When we try to specify the meaning of beauty and ugliness as aesthetic terms and to capture their mutual relationship more clearly though, we find out that the more precise delineation we achieve, the more non-intuitive implications our definition picks up (e.g. beauty and ugliness are on the opposite ends of the same scale, with an aesthetically neutral point between them - a zero level of aesthetic quality where we would place the aesthetically indifferent objects, which are nevertheless (from the point of view of aesthetic value) better off than those we evaluate as ugly).
All of these ultimately point to the most fundamental question what we still consider an aesthetic judgment and how we really use the words of our language to capture the aesthetic qualities. In my paper I proceed from the thinking of the British aesthetician and philosopher of natural language, Frank Sibley, and I attempt to present the interconnection of the issues of aesthetic judgment, aesthetic use of language and the nature of the aesthetic qualities through an analysis of the terms of beauty and ugliness.